An Investor Offered Me Two Million Dollars for My Hop Farm and Brewery. Then I Read Page Forty-Three of Her Contract

I didn’t sign it.

Tessa resigned from the firm a month later. She said she couldn’t work for people who would take a family’s land through a footnote.

Then she called me with a different idea.

She’d structured a new deal with a group of smaller investors. Brewery owners, a couple of retired farmers and a Seattle restaurant group that already carried our beer. A smaller investment, through an LLC that owned only the brewery, never the farm. No conversion clause. No milestones that could cost me the land.

My lawyer called it the cleanest contract he’d ever read.

The new canning line went in last spring. We’re in five states now.

And Tessa?

She moved to Yakima in June. She says it’s because she’s opening her own small investment fund for family farms and breweries in the valley.

I say it’s because of me.

We argue about it on the patio most evenings, with a beer between us and the hop vines climbing twenty feet into the sunset.

Last week, she reached over, took my hand and said, “Fine. It’s a little bit because of you.”

I’m taking the win.

Would you have risked your job to warn him? Tell me in the comments.