USA: Molson Coors breaks ground on upgrade of its Golden, Colorado plant

Molson Coors Beverage Co. broke ground on an upgrade of its 147-year-old Golden, Colorado plant on Tuesday, October 6 that company leaders say will pump “hundreds of millions” of dollars into the facility and prepare it to make better beer and more types of products, the Denver Business Journal reported.

Company CEO Gavin Hattersley alluded to the investment in October, when he announced that the company was moving its headquarters from Denver to Chicago — a process that continues to be ongoing, slowed by coronavirus. This week’s action not only marked the kick-off of fulfilling that promise but provided details to what exactly the worldwide alcohol and non-alcoholic beverage company plans for the country’s largest single-site brewing facility.

The upgrades will replace the brewery’s fermenting, aging, filtration and cellaring systems, most of which are between 50 and 70 years old, said Peter Coors, director of G150 commissions and operations — an acronym for the Golden plant, which turns 150 years old in 2023. Coors is the son of former Molson Coors chairman Pete Coors and a fifth-generation family member piloting the Coors brewery.

The result of such massive investments will be a 25% reduction in beer waste and a reduction in water and energy usage that is between 15% and 20%, Coors said. Plus, with the implementation of more modern equipment that can perform tasks such as temperature-controlled cooling of the beer during the fermentation process, Coors said he expects the brewery to make better beer in its Golden location.

In the big picture, the construction, which will continue through about 2024, even after the first beer rolls out of the new system in 2023, will make the plant more integral to the nationwide system of six brewing facilities operated by Molson Coors, Coors said. And while they will not immediately lead to more beer or different kinds of beverages being made in Golden, such an option is possible in the future — a key option considering the recent push by the company into areas such as hard seltzer, alcoholic coffee beverages and other non-beer alternatives.

“With cellars that are 1950s/1960s vintage, we really need to make a major in those cellars if we were going to keep them open,” Coors said in a telephone interview. “And this will open up the window to more brands we don’t currently make to be coming our way.”

Company officials have not determined yet whether the upgrades will change the number of full-time workers employed at the plant in the long run, a number that now stands at 800, which represents about half of the overall Molson Coors employees in the Golden valley. However, it will require about 500 construction workers at the peak of the project, and officials will look to hire locally as much as possible, Coors said.

Coors said he hopes as well that the sizable investment — officials have not yet determined exactly how much it will cost — will reassure company workers as well as Denver-area business leaders about the prominence of the plant in the company’s plans going forward.

Hattersley chose to relocate the company’s headquarters to existing space in Chicago as part of a $150 million cost-savings plan meant to allow the company to pump more money into investments such as methods to get those beverages to market more quickly. When all relocations are final, that will have taken about 300 highly paid executives out of Denver and will have left the city without a major headquarters that was a traditional presence here.

This investment signifies that Molson Coors will need to continue operating the sprawling Golden plant — the only brewery in the company that makes Coors Banquet beer — for decades to come, Peter Coors said.

“It really sets Golden up for the next 50 years. When you look at what we are doing, we will continue having to invest capital here for many years. But this really sets Golden up to be able to compete in our network across America,” Coors said. “It makes the Coors family happy. It was a really strong statement by Gavin and his team about the importance of Golden."

06 October, 2020