Includes bibliographical references (p. 354-357) and index.

"Citizen Coors is the saga of an American dynasty. From the moment the destitute Prussian Adolph Coors stows away on a Baltimore-bound ship in 1868 to the worldwide expansion of the billion-dollar Coors Brewing Company, Citizen Coors is a headlong American tale of triumph over bare-knuckle competition. The Coors family does it the old-fashioned way, through fearsome devotion to product, rejection of modern marketing, and refusing to borrow so much as a nickel." "But the family almost rides its principles into the ground. "Nobody will ever choose a beer on the basis of a thirty-second ad," Bill Coors is fond of saying at a time when his two main competitors, Anheuser-Busch and Miller, are spending upward of a billion dollars a year on ads. He won't even allow a ring-pull can." "The brewery's decline and recovery are dizzying. But Citizen Coors is more than a business story. Citizen Coors is finally a chronicle of how America was shaped politically in the last three decades of the twentieth century. For along with the Coors family's adherence to handshake integrity and old-world craft came some less roseate ideals from the nineteenth century: that disparity of wealth is proper, that government efforts to achieve social equality are illegitimate, that the Bible is the rule book for intimate conduct, and that capital must never bow to labor. The Coors family forever changed the American political landscape by creating the Heritage Foundation and a right-wing TV network, by financing the conservative shift in Congress, and by being early backers of a politically ambitious B-movie actor named Ronald Reagan." "Based on more than 150 interviews, Citizen Coors serves up a powerful cocktail of beer and politics. Dan Baum captures in this narrative the genius, eccentricity, and tragic weaknesses of the remarkable Coors family."--BOOK JACKET.