I’ve always wondered this since high school chemistry. Why would a brewing company make crucibles? It seems an unusual business choice.
Not the same Coors.
I wonder whether they started out making crucibles and reaction vessels and barrels adn things and then discovered that, hey, these ones are good for making beer?
However it’s owned by a trust of the Coors family.
I don’t see why they wouldn’t branch out into foods…oh, you didnt say “Why does Coors make Crunchibles”?
And your link explains why I had a mortar and pestle that bore the Coors beer logo many years ago. At one time they really were one and the same.
And now it’s clearer, thinking about a company that was into aluminum cans and porcelain.
I saw a program on the History channel that said Coors got into ceramics during prohibition. I don’t know well HC checked it’s facts for this and I don’t have time to look into it now but the logo sure is similiar.
The same program mentioned that Pabst invented the process for making velveeta cheese during prohibition but sold it to Kraft after prohibition ended.
It’s simple. Adolph Coors started making his own beer bottles. Changes in the international economy eventually led to making porcelain for laboratories. There have been spin-offs and buyouts, but it’s the same Coors, and they still own it.
Yep, and their offices are still right down the street from the brewery (about five minutes from my house). 
For that matter, branches of the same company make my mom’s canning supplies and the main optics on the Hubble Space Telescope. The Ball company started off making jars, but during one of the World Wars, contributed to the war effort by making canopies for airplanes. From there, they branched out into aircraft instrumentation, and from there to space instrumentation.
Hence the Ball turret!
(d&r)
Actually, the Ball Corporation has, as they put it, “exited the home canning business”, which they spun off in 1993 to a separate company. Jarden Corporation retains the Ball brand and logo for the canning jars and suchlike that they manufacture, but they are not part of Ball Corporation:
Bigheads. Making containers for my pickles and jam isn’t good enough for them anymore, huh? :mad: (Yeah yeah yeah, I know it was probably a rational business decision.)
A few years ago I worked with Coors a little on the ceramic ferrules they make for terminating fiber optics. I got a long history of Coors in ceramics, which I have mostly forgotten, and don’t know if they are still in fiber optics. But at the time I wound up thinking the beer business was just an odd tangent for them.
I have been using Coors Porcelain-ware for years, I’m sitting a few feet from several pieces right now (spot dishes, a mortar and pestle and a few sizes of small bowls). The story I’ve always heard was that they needed labware for the brewery and since there was none available that was American-made they made it themselves and began selling it.
Every Mudlogging unit I’ve ever been in has had Coors labware products in it.
Unclviny
Hre’s an article which mentions using Coors ceramic products for a rather different purpose: http://www.merkle.com/pluto/pluto.html (scroll about halfway down.)