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&Fears that he saw the response as “…a fairly natural human reaction. It’s like when you find a band that you really love. You have a connection to it, and for whatever reason they blow up and they’re everywhere. You feel like something that was really special and intimate to you is lost.” But beyond the emotional reaction to the sale of the company to TSG, there was a concern about whether or not the company could maintain quality and stay true to the principals they had operated under for the first decade of its existence.

When I asked Cho about the deal and its possible effect on the company, he referenced things he had heard from those in coffee companies who’d received big investments. According to him, their experience was “an immediate clash between the MBA-types and the culture of specialty coffee. From the way coffee sourcing contracts are made, to the retail systems, to the way folks are hired and fired… ” Though when it comes to Stumptown’s deal with TSG, and its recent acquisition by Peet’s, Cho and others are still waiting to see how it plays out before they go on the record passing any judgment.

In regards to the quality of their coffee, Chuck Patton mentioned he had noticed a drop-off in the number of “mind blowing coffees” since the deal: “They still obviously were presenting some good coffees on their offering sheet, but once you have an investment team—the whole goal of that team is to increase profits and sell the company… the easiest way to shore up the profits is to limit what you’re paying for green coffee and keep the retail the same price.”

Lounsburry has heard this critique before, and his response has been an open invitation for anyone to get in touch with their longtime wholesale clients to ask if their quality and service had changed at all since the TSG investment. Regardless of individual opinions on the quality of the coffee, talking with Lounsburry, it was clear that his energy and excitement still revolved around the coffee. At one point in our conversation Lounsburry went on a tangent about incoming Geisha lots that had been farmed from seed stock Duane had smuggled from a Panamanian farm, Esmeralda, and then grown at El Puente and El Injerto farms in Guatemala.