Beautiful engraved RARE Specimen Certificate from the Adolph Coors Company dated in 1975 when the company had their IPO. This historic document was printed by American Bank Note Company and has an ornate border around it with a vignette of a family harvesting grapes. This item has the printed signatures of the Company's President, J.J. Coors and Secretary, L. C. Sund and is over 40 years old.
Certificate Adolph Coors (February 4, 1847 June 5, 1929) was a brewer who started the Adolph Coors Company in Golden, Colorado in 1873. Adolph was the son of Joseph Kuhrs (c1820-1862) and Helena Hein (c1820-1862), and was born in Barmen in Rhenish Prussia on February 4, 1847. He was apprenticed at age thirteen to the book and stationery store of Andrea & Company in nearby Ruhrort from November of 1860 until June of 1862. The Kuhrs family moved to Dortmund, Westphalia, where Adolph was educated. His mother died on April 2, 1862. In July of 1862, Adolph was apprenticed for a three year period at a brewery owned by Henry Wenker in Dortmund. He was charged a fee for his apprenticeship, so he worked as a bookkeeper to pay for his apprenticeship. His father died on November 24, 1862. Orphaned, Adolph completed his apprenticeship and continued to work as a paid employee at the Wenker Brewery until May of 1867. He then worked at breweries in Kassel, Berlin, and Uelzen in Germany. Early in 1868, he immigrated to the United States. He sailed from Hamburg to New York City and then moved to Chicago arriving on May 30, 1868. His name was changed from "Kuhrs" to "Coors". He worked in the spring as a laborer, and during the summer he worked as a brewer. In the fall and winter he worked as a fireman, loading coal into the firebox of a steam engine. In the spring and summer of 1869 he worked as an apprentice bricklayer and a stone cutter. He became foreman of John Stenger's brewery on August 11, 1869, in Naperville, Illinois, about 35 miles west of Chicago. He resigned from Stenger's brewery on January 22, 1872, and arrived in Denver in April. He worked in Denver as a gardener for a month, then on May 1, 1872 he purchased a partnership in the bottling firm of John Staderman. In the same year he bought and assumed control of the entire business. An advertisement in Corbett, Hoye & Company's Directory of the City of Denver for 1873 on page 242 showed Adolph Coors as a dealer in "bottled beer, ale, porter and cider, imported and domestic wines, and seltzer water." His place of business was located in the Tappan Block on Holladay (now Market) Street between E and F Streets (now 14th and 15th). The same directory shows that Coors lived on Curtis Street between IC and L (20th and 21st) Streets. On November 14, 1873, Coors and the Denver confectioner Jacob Schueler purchased the abandoned Golden City Tannery and converted it to the Golden Brewery. By February of 1874 they were producing beer for sale. In 1880 Coors purchased Schueler's interest, and the brewery remains majority family-owned as of 2006. When Prohibition was passed in Colorado in 1914, he converted his brewery to make malted milk. The company also manufactured porcelain and ceramic products made from clay mined in Golden. The Coors Porcelain division has since split off, and is now known as CoorsTek. Coors Brewing Company Location Golden, Colorado United States Owner Molson Coors Brewing Company Year opened 1873 Active Beers Coors Original Pale lager Coors Light Light pale lager Coors Extra Gold Light pale lager Keystone Pale lager Keystone Light Light pale lager Keystone Ice Pale lager Aspen Edge Pale lager Killian's Irish Red Pale lager Blue Moon Belgian Wheat The Coors Brewing Company is a regional division of the world's fifth-largest brewery companies, the Molson Coors Brewing Company. According to the Molson-Coors website, the division is the third-largest brewer in the U.S. The brewery in Golden, Colorado is the world's largest on a single site. The Coors Brewing Company is the principal subsidiary of the Adolph Coors Company. In 1873, German immigrants Adolph Coors and Jacob Schueler, a successful Denver businessman, established a brewery in Golden, Colorado. Coors invested $2000 in the operation, to Schuer's investment of $18,000. In 1880, Coors bought out his partner in "The Golden Brewery". His pale lager, nicknamed the "Banquet Beer" or "Premiums" and is now known as "Coors Banquet" once again after being dubbed "Coors Original" for many years. It is said to take its flavor from the pure water of the Rocky Mountains. Coors' company survived the prohibition era in America by diversifying into manufacture of other products including malted milk and ceramics. The Coors Ceramics business was later spun off as CoorsTek. According to the Coors website, in 1959, Coors became the first American brewer to package beer in an all-aluminum two-piece beverage can. For much of its history, Coors beer was a regional product mostly confined to the American west. The major reason is that Coors beer is not pasteurized, and thus shipments were limited to areas where the beer could remain refrigerated. This made it a novelty on the east coast, and visitors returning from visits to the western states often made a point of bringing back a case. This iconic status was reflected in pop culture: in 1977 the movie Smokey and the Bandit centered around an illegal shipment of Coors from Texas to Georgia. The company finally established nationwide distribution in the U.S. in the early 1990s. Coors brewery in Golden, ColoradoIn 2003, Coors was the third largest producer of beer in the United States, and the second largest brewer in the United Kingdom through its subsidiary, Coors Brewers Limited. There it controls the UK's most popular brew, Carling. On July 22, 2004 the company announced it would be merging with Canadian brewer Molson. The merger was completed February 9, 2005 and the merged company is called Molson Coors Brewing Company. Through its owners and foundation, Coors also has played a prominent role in American politics and public policy, supporting many conservative causes, including The Heritage Foundation, one of the world's most influential conservative public policy research institutes, and, via its parent company, the right-wing think tank American Enterprise Institute. Chairman Pete Coors ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate from Colorado in 2004 on the Republican ticket. Coors has a long history of labor strife that came to a head in the late 1970s with a nationwide boycott led by the AFL-CIO, the nation's largest union. A Federal Lawsuit by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 1975 ended in a settlement with the company agreeing not to discriminate against blacks, Mexican-Americans, and women. By 1979, the boycott continued and the union was broken. History from Wikipedia and OldCompanyResearch.com.

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About Specimens Specimen Certificates are actual certificates that have never been issued. They were usually kept by the printers in their permanent archives as their only example of a particular certificate. Sometimes you will see a hand stamp on the certificate that says "Do not remove from file". Specimens were also used to show prospective clients different types of certificate designs that were available. Specimen certificates are usually much scarcer than issued certificates. In fact, many times they are the only way to get a certificate for a particular company because the issued certificates were redeemed and destroyed. In a few instances, Specimen certificates we made for a company but were never used because a different design was chosen by the company. These certificates are normally stamped "Specimen" or they have small holes spelling the word specimen. Most of the time they don't have a serial number, or they have a serial number of 00000. This is an exciting sector of the hobby that grown in popularity over the past several years.