Coors Golden Brewery Modernization Cuts 80 Million Gallons of Water a Year

The Coors brewery in Golden is the second-largest single brewing site in the world, and it just spent four years being rebuilt around itself.

Molson Coors named the program G150 for the company’s approaching 150th anniversary. Work broke ground in 2020 and the finished plant was unveiled in October 2024. The company hasn’t disclosed a total, describing it only as a multi-hundred-million-dollar investment.

Project Scope

The centerpiece is a 200,000-square-foot complex running about 1,000 feet, holding new fermenting, aging and filtration capacity. Crews also modernized the government cellars, where beer is held before packaging. Total labor came to more than 2.4 million hours.

The sequencing constraint was the hard part: Golden never stopped brewing. Tie-ins to live process piping, live utilities and live refrigeration had to be staged around production, on a site that has run continuously since 1873 and is hemmed in by Clear Creek and the foothills.

Why It Matters

The number that matters to anyone building process plants is 80 million gallons. That’s the annual water reduction from the new fermenting and filtration train, on a site where water is both the primary ingredient and the primary constraint.

Golden sits in the Colorado Front Range, where every industrial water right has been spoken for over a century. Molson Coors didn’t add water supply. It rebuilt the process so it needs less, which is the only expansion path available to a lot of Western industrial sites now.

Project Team & Details