By 2011 Stumptown had opened two cafes in Seattle, a cafe in New York City’s Ace Hotel, along with a roasters and a cafe in Red Hook, they were starting to bottle cold brew in the back of their original location in Portland, and they ended up taking a huge investment from the beverage group TSG. The exact details of the deal never were made public, but the general understanding was that the investment company ended up with a majority stake in Stumptown.

For some in the coffee community, the sale constituted a betrayal. Todd Charmicael, founder of La Colombe, called Duane Sorenson a sellout in a column for Esquire, and a lot of fans of the company echoed the sentiment. Ken Olson, publisher of Barista Magazine, told Hopes&Fearsyour own integrity, you will sooner or later wind up where Michael Cohen has wound up — having ruined your life.

In “East of Eden,” John Steinbeck writes: “Humans are caught — in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too — in a net of good and evil. I think this is the only story we have and that it occurs on all levels of feeling and intelligence. Virtue and vice were warp and woof of our first consciousness, and they will be the fabric of our last. … A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard clean questions: was it good