"Pure Rocky Mountain Spring Water" isn't just a marketer's phrase; it is the ingredient that fueled Adolph Coors' dream of owning his own brewery in the 1870s, and then went on to make Coors the third largest brewing company in the United States. It might seem easy to dismiss Coors as just another brewery, but Coors has achieved what many other companies—beer or otherwise—would cherish: a mystique that reaches out to more than just beer drinkers.

Adolph Coors (1847-1929) was born in Barmen, Prussia, and worked as an apprentice at the Henry Wenker Brewery in Dortmund, Germany. In 1868, he fled a war-ravaged Germany to the United States as a stowaway on a ship, and in 1872 he arrived in Denver, Colorado, anxious to pursue his dream of owning a brewery. In Golden, Colorado, along the banks of Clear Creek, he found the water that he believed would...