Once Bill had assured himself of a regular supply of steel cans, he turned his attention to the reasons he disliked them. Canned beer admittedly had many advantages over bottled, especially among Coors’s Western customers, who often took beer on hikes and picnics. Cans were smaller and lighter than bottles, and they didn’t break. They also required no deposit. However popular this was with customers, it worried Bill. As he drove around Colorado, the sight of beer cans along the roadside disgusted him. Not only were they ugly, but they were a threat to the company and the family. Prohibition had taught him how quickly a popular sentiment could mutate into government policy. He reasoned that if beer-can litter bothered him, it probably bothered others, too. Sooner or later, government would get around to regulating cans to control litter. If government put a deposit on the cans, essentially forcing the brewers to take them back and deal with disposal, Bill would have a disaster on his hands. Unlike bottles, steel cans couldn’t be reused. Bill decided the industry had to do something about can litter before government did.

Coors had always seen steel cans as a necessary evil, anyway; the customer wanted canned beer, but the Coorses disliked the effects of steel and solder on their brew. Over time, the can clouded its contents and queered the taste. Bill and his father were striving to keep their beer on the light side of American taste by adding ever more rice and reducing the concentration of hops. The delicate brew they were creating was particularly sensitive to taint. Steel cans required so much solder—around the top, around the bottom, and up the big side seam—that even with tin "keg-lining" the cans were fundamentally incompatible with good beer.

When a character named Lou Bronstein showed up in Bill’s office in 1954, suggesting that beer cans could be made of aluminum, Bill’s first impulse was to have him ejected from the brewery. Bronstein was, as Bill later put it, "the antithesis of Coors, a fly-by-night," a fast-talking operator in a shiny suit. He reeked of the East Coast.

In fact, Bronstein was born in Vienna to a wealthy Jewish family. His father, a physician, wanted his son to follow him into medicine, but young Bronstein was, as a colleague remembered him, "too nervous to be a doctor," the kind of man who is forever remembering what he was going to say a few minutes ago. Instead of wanting to be a doctor, Bronstein wanted to be a deal-maker and make his millions the easy way. By all accounts, though, Bronstein’s father had exerted every bit as much patriarchal authority as had the elder Coors men. Bronstein had trooped off to his premedical training with a heavy heart, knowing he’d been cowed into doing the wrong thing. It took Hitler to set him free.

Whether he was eager to slip his father’s leash or was smart enough to see what was in store for Viennese Jews, or both, Bronstein left Europe relatively early—early enough to have become a U.S. citizen in time to enlist in the U.S. Army after Pearl Harbor. He fought with Gen. George Patton from North Africa all the way up the Italian boot. It was awful, but Bronstein used the battles as an all-expenses-paid research trip to explore potential products and markets. He came away unwounded and completely devoted to the consumer potential of aluminum.

What first caught his eye were the clever little drinking cups Italian soldiers carried—so light, so durable, so pleasant in the hand. Bronstein bought thousands of them right after the war and sold out of them immediately in New York. The experience taught him that people love the feathery gray metal, and that he had the chance to be in on the ground floor of a multibillion-dollar aluminum craze. Pots, pans, doorknobs, bicycles, auto frames...almost anything made of steel could be made stronger and lighter from aluminum. The giant British aluminum company Alcan Aluminium apparently thought the market was about to erupt, too; it had just built a behemoth of an aluminum plant in British Columbia that was far too big for current demand. Knowing Alcan would be looking for customers, Bronstein convinced the company to let him act as a kind of broker; if he lined up enough customers for its aluminum, Alcan would guarantee them a low price. Now Bronstein was traveling the country, supply in hand, looking for demand. He’d already been to see a friend of Bill’s, who had sent him to Bill.

"Hiya Bill," Bronstein said, lowering himself into a chair before being asked. Whatever Viennese elegance Bronstein had once possessed was long gone. He lit a cigarette and looked around for an ashtray, but because smoking was forbidden in the brewery there was none. Cupping his palm under the ash, he tried a few raunchy jokes on Bill and got a stony silence in return. Then he plunged into his pitch.

"A couple of little kraut breweries use aluminum beer cans, but the process is clumsy and too expensive for mass production," he said, talking about six times faster than Bill was used to.

An operator like Bronstein was repellent to Bill Coors. But in his extended pitch, Bronstein had unwittingly struck several of Bill’s chords. Bill told himself to put aside his dislike of the man’s style. He did what checking he could and finally agreed to form a small partnership under the grandiose title of Aluminum International. Bill would put up a little money, and Bronstein would be his tour guide through the world of aluminum. Bill consented to go with Bronstein on a five-week research tour through Europe at Coors’s expense. On the airplane east, Bronstein confided that he had several ex-wives after him for alimony, which explained their odd travel arrangements: Bronstein had them entering and leaving each country through different cities.

The trip was a nightmare for Bill: cramped quarters, inadequate exercise, fatty food, and confinement with the windbag Bronstein. But Bronstein delivered. He knew the people to see, the can plants to visit, the laboratories to plumb for information. As they hopped from Frankfurt to Stuttgart to Mainz, Bill grew increasingly excited. Every aluminum can the Germans made cost them 25 cents. Bill’s mind whirred in tune with the machinery as he calculated costs. Coors could make its own aluminum cans, he thought, and could do it cheaper than the Germans. Bill wrote check after check for used presses, printers, washers, casting lines, and trimmers. He ordered them to be shipped to Golden posthaste, not knowing how all the machinery would fit together. When he got home, he confidently told his family it would take no more than half a year and another $250,000 to begin producing aluminum cans for Coors beer. He approached Alcoa about forming a partnership, but Alcoa told Bill he was dreaming. Nobody can profitably make beverage cans out of aluminum, Alcoa told him, especially not a third-string beer-maker in Colorado. Bill filed away the insult and pushed forward. His grandfather had made malt, ice, and bottles at a time when other brewers stuck only to beer. Why shouldn’t he make his own cans?

Bill needed an experienced aluminum engineer to launch his grand project. He did not, however, conduct a nationwide search for the best man; he simply opened the Denver Yellow Pages, where, down among the small print, he found the name Ruben Hartmeister. Hartmeister was a skinny, balding, and bespectacled man who was slowly going broke in his own small machine shop. Early in his career, Hartmeister had worked in an aluminum rolling mill. He told Bill he’d been raised by a Lutheran minister and would be able to read the German manuals that would accompany the machinery. He also modestly mentioned that his grandfather was the inventor of Beech-Nut chewing tobacco.

Hartmeister had no idea what he was doing. He’d been taught church German; the technical German of the manuals was opaque. But he did indeed have a passion for experimentation. He began bolting machinery together, manufacturing needed parts on his own lathe. He and Bronstein went to Europe together and loaded up 17 suitcases with aluminum slugs, tools, and bits of machinery. Upon Hartmeister’s return, he and Bill spent hours cycling through ideas, sketching for each other on the backs of old brewery invoices. Having served his purpose, Bronstein was paid for his share of Aluminum International and vanished into obscurity. After several months of tinkering, Hartmeister came to Bill’s office with a crude aluminum can. Bill carried it around the brewery like the grail of Christ.

Only pure aluminum was soft enough to flow around the piston in the impact intrusion process that squished out hollow cans. The hated Alcoa was the only source of pure aluminum slugs, and its price was sky-high—in part, Bill suspected, to keep him from going forward. So Bill wheedled more money out of his father and brothers for a slug press of his own, vertically integrating the company yet another step. He and Hartmeister brainstormed constantly, and then it would be up to Hartmeister to wield wrench and cutting torch to give their ideas shape. Making slugs wasn’t as easy as Bill had hoped. The equipment frequently jammed, and when the hot aluminum stopped moving it threatened to destroy the machine altogether. When that happened, Hartmeister and his helpers had to grab 900-degree slabs of aluminum with tongs and run, shouting, out onto Washington Street, scattering pedestrians in every direction. Hartmeister’s arms were streaked with burns where the hot aluminum disks had rolled along them. In time, though, Hartmeister became an expert at making slugs. He could produce them at less than half Alcoa’s price, and pretty soon Coors was selling slugs to General Motors for speedometer tubes, forcing Alcoa to lower its price and affording Bill a measure of vengeful satisfaction.

Though can-making and slug manufacturing were solved, Coors still wasn’t ready to sell beer in aluminum cans. The bottleneck now was printing on the labels. The machine that Hartmeister had developed could print only 180 cans a minute, far too slow given the river of beer that Coors needed to can daily. Late on Thanksgiving Day in 1957, Hartmeister came into the shop, turned on the lights, and began scrounging his bits and pieces for a new printer. He worked on a printer—code-named Relentless—all through the winter and spring. On July 7, 1958, Hartmeister loaded Relentless with cans and ink and flipped the switch. A hurricane of cans shot through the machine and clattered all over the floor; Hartmeister hadn’t yet designed a catcher. Hartmeister had 513 perfectly printed cans. He ran across the street with the good news. "We’re off and running!" Bill shouted.

Coors began pouring beer into aluminum cans on Jan. 22, 1959. Bill convened the first press conference in the company’s history and was dubbed "the inventor of the aluminum can." It had taken five years and $10 million—rather more than the six months and quarter-million dollars Bill had predicted. And the can wasn’t close to perfect; the walls of the can were so thick that it weighed more than a steel can.

But Coors was making aluminum beverage cans for a penny and a half apiece—the first American beverage company to fill aluminum cans, let alone manufacture them. Coors eventually refined the aluminum can into the delicate, featherweight, instantly chilled container it is today. Because the aluminum cans, unlike steel, can be recycled, Coors had solved the litter issue. Because the cans can be sterilized before beer is poured into them, Coors had removed the need to stew the beer in hot water to pasteurize it and kill the taste.

To appreciate what beverage cans were like before Coors’s achievement, pick up a can of peas and imagine drinking a beer out of such a heavy, clunky, hard-to-chill hunk of metal. Then consider how many beverage cans are drained in a day and what a mountain of nonrecyclable containers that would create.

The work of Bill Coors and Ruben Hartmeister eventually rendered the entire steel beverage-can industry obsolete. American Can, Continental Can, and all of Coors’s beer competitors had to come hat-in-hand to Golden to buy the technology. By 1990, Coors was operating the biggest aluminum can plant in the world—manufacturing four billion cans a year.

From the book Citizen Coors by Dan Baum. Copyright © 2000 by Dan Baum. Reprinted by permission of William Morrow & Co., Inc.