Sisters Coffee Company co-founder Winfield Durham collects freshly roasted coffee to be cooled and bagged at the Sisters Coffee House on Monday.

The aroma of fresh-roasted coffee beans wafted through Sisters Coffee Company Monday morning as Winfield Durham opened the door on the 25-kilogram German-made Probat drum coffee roaster and poured the medium brown beans grown in Peru onto a drying tray.

Durham, the co-founder of Sisters Coffee Company along with his wife, Joy, has been roasting coffee for 22 years. First, he sold his freshly roasted coffee out of a tiny location he called “the shack” in downtown Sisters. In 2005, the Durhams built a new 6,000-square-foot Sisters Coffee Company at 273 W. Hood Ave. in Sisters, and in 2008 they opened the “Outpost” at 635 Arrowleaf in Sisters.

This spring, the Durhams branched out again with the opening of another Sisters Coffee Company location in Portland’s Pearl District, at 12325 N.W. Marshall St.

“This is a dream come true for my wife, Joy, and I. When we started Sisters Coffee Company in 1989, we never thought we’d have three locations, let alone a coffeehouse in Portland,” Durham said.

When the Durhams opened their first coffee shop in 1984, Winfield was 31 and Joy was 27, and they did all the work themselves. Now he is 58 and she is 54, and Sisters Coffee Company has grown from a mom-and-pop business into a chain of three stores with 50 employees.

Durham said the volume of coffee he roasts has grown from less than 50 pounds a week in 1989 to more than 1,000 pounds a week in 2005. Now the company roasts more than 3,000 pounds of coffee a week to support the three stores.

“Coffee has proven to be a recession-proof business,” said Joy Durham, adding that the company’s coffee sales continued to grow at a rate of 20 percent a year or more since they moved into their new building in 2005. She said the growth trend has continued even through the recession.

Winfield credits the company’s success in part to faith, hard work, and to his son Justin and daughter-in-law Leigh-anne joining the company in 2005.

The Durhams have come a long way since the 1980s, when a “step of faith” led him to give up a construction career and make the decision to open a coffee house called the Coffee Express in Sitka, Alaska, in 1984. Two years later, the couple decided to sell the coffee house for $20,000 with plans of returning to Oregon.

But the couple were hooked on the coffee business. Three years later, after working construction to add more equity to the money they made selling their Alaska business, the couple opened the first Sisters Coffee Company in a 600-square-foot building.

From the beginning, Winfield Durham said, their faith, desire to help others and commitment to sustainability have guided their business decisions.

In the face of competition from national brands such as Starbucks and local companies such as Strictly Organic Coffee Co., those values have helped them craft a philosophy of buying coffee direct from growers after they meet with them and visit their plantations. They buy coffee directly from farmers, in Guatemala, Peru, Uganda and many other countries, primarily coffee grown in high mountain equatorial coffee fields, Durham said.

Justin, who serves as director of sales and operations, said they have learned what soil types, elevations and mountain regions in Mexico, Central America, Uganda and other areas produce the richest, most flavorful coffee.

The focus on small growers recently led them to partner with another Sisters company, nonprofit Kabum Coffee International, a 501(c)3 corporation, which was set up to help 30 coffee farmers in Uganda brand and market coffee directly in the United States to increase the farmers’ share of profits.

In another effort to support local growers, the company will host a Guatemala night this Saturday to celebrate the company directly trading with the country’s coffee growers. The event will feature Aurelio Villatoro, from the grower cooperative Direct Trade Coffee, and a short film about his family’s coffee plantation in the Huehuetenago region of Guatemala.

The Durhams visited the plantation and watched how the Villatoro family raises and processes its coffee to remove the outer husks and dry the beans before bagging them in burlap for shipment to Sisters Coffee Company.

“We will have a tasting of his 2011 crop, which just placed second in the national crop of excellence competition,” said Justin Durham. “That is a very big deal. Every year thousands of growers enter the competition.”

To buy coffee direct from the Guatemalan growers, Sisters Coffee Company must buy 200 bags, he said.

“We bought the whole crop from one micro-lot,” which is a term referring to tagged lots where coffee beans are grown for a particular customer.

The basics

Who: Winfield Durham

What: Sisters Coffee Company

Main Address: 273 W. Hood Ave., Sisters

Phone: 541-549-0527

Website: www.sisterscoffee.com