The Story Behind All Those Awards.

If you’ve followed BonLife Coffee Roasters for a while or stopped by our cafe, you may have noticed that we’ve won a few awards along the course of our ten and half years of business. Ever wondered what the story is behind all of those awards? Read on to find out!

It all started a couple of years after BonLife Coffee Roasters opened. Of course, we had always planned on striving to be the best coffee roaster we possibly could be. But about two years after BonLife opened, one of the owners competed in the U.S. Aeropress Championship and won first place. Since the day Jeremey won that golden AeroPress, our thirst for being number one has never left us.

We started taking BonLife coffee to as many competitions that we could. We competed in the U.S. Coffee Championship, Cascadia Roasters Competition, Golden Bean North America, and more. You can see a detailed list of awards and honorable mentions here. We were placing and winning at many of these competitions!

Even during the remote life of 2020, we found ways to compete. We submitted our Kenya Kiambu Muiri for the Good Food Awards’ coffee division... and we won! In order to win a Good Food Award for coffee, the roast has to meet certain tasting standards. They judge coffees for exemplary flavor – sweet, clean, well developed body, balanced acidity and phenomenal aromatics. But to even qualify for entry in Good Food Awards, roasters must emphasize fairness and transparency from seed to cup. Now that’s an award we can get behind!

And of course, there’s one of our most favorite competitions: Golden Bean. Hosted in a different city every year, Golden Bean is the world’s largest coffee roasting competition. Every year BonLife staff and owners pack up some carefully roasted beans and hop on a plane to Golden Bean North America. We don’t just love this competition because we won overall champion more than once. We love that we get to meet like-minded coffee roasters; we love that this is a competition focused on the roaster and recognizing excellence in that crucial part of the coffee process; and we love that the judges are roasters and coffee professionals just like us.

But is it really about the shiny medals for us here at BonLife? No. Thing about all of these awards is this: at the end of the day we just want to honor the hard work of the farmers who grew our coffee and put an excellent cup of coffee in your hands. The competitions continually challenge us to be the best coffee roaster that we can.
All of this striving to be number one comes from our desire to do our farmers justice and to provide you with some amazing coffee.