ENTERPRISE — Scott McDonald has a business unique in Wallowa County and not so common elsewhere — he roasts dried coffee beans that are sold and ground locally for some of the freshest coffee to be had.

“The freshness of the beans is what I’m trying to accomplish, to keep the beans on the shelf as fresh as possible,” he said. “A fresh-roasted bean is a lot different than something you’d get out of a Folgers can.”

Operating out of a small space in Enterprise, McDonald’s Joseph Creek Coffee provides fresh-roasted beans to local outlets both for wholesale and retail sale.

McDonald, whose “day job” is managing and facilities maintenance at Eagle’s View Inn and Suites, has been roasting coffee beans since 2012. He’s been at his current location since late 2019, using the roaster he purchased in 2016 from a manufacturer in Sandpoint, Idaho.

“This machine can do 100 pounds of coffee an hour,” he said. “If I were to run at that capacity for any number of hours, I would need to expand my supply and packaging and all that.”

So he keeps his production limited to local demand.

“This summer, when there was quite a demand, I was roasting twice a week and doing quite a few pounds,” he said.

But he usually just keeps his local outlets supplied to the point where they neither run out nor have too much product on the shelf for too long.

“It’s a lot different approach than just buying coffee off the shelf in the store,” he said. “My coffee’s going to be the freshest coffee there.”

McDonald said most of his beans are grown in Nicaragua, though he gets some from Costa Rica. They’re imported to Oakland, California, and come to Enterprise from there.

“I normally do Central American beans, but I have roasted South American and African beans, as well,” he said. “It’s an equatorial crop — it has to grow within a certain distance from the Equator.”

He noted the only place beans are grown in the U.S. is in Hawaii. However, he said, there are current efforts to grow it in Southern California.

“But there, it’s more of a greenhouse crop at that point,” he said.

McDonald favors a medium roast, rather than the dark roast coffee-drinkers find at outlets such as Starbucks, or the light, tart, Scandinavian roast that has become popular in the past decade.

“I emphasize in my roasts some of the more caramelized flavors, the chocolate flavors that are not so acidic,” he said.

McDonald said he hopes to be able to expand his operation to beyond Wallowa County and draw customers elsewhere in Oregon, Idaho and Washington.

He emphasized the importance of coffee beans being freshly roasted.

“Fresh coffee is like fresh bread,” McDonald said. “You can buy fresh bread and eat it that day and it’s really good. You leave it a week or two, it’s either going to go moldy or it’s going to go stale. Coffee beans do go stale; they’ll even go rancid.”