Golden Bean Coffee Roasters Competition: Behind the Scenes

With Golden Bean World Series coming up soon (eeek!), we thought we’d share a previous blog post about Golden Bean. Read on to find out what this coffee roasters’ competition is and why we love it so much.

The Golden Bean coffee roasters competition has earned a special place in our hearts, and it’s not just because we’ve won several awards there or because it is the world’s largest Coffee Roasting Competition. . It’s a special coffee competition! What do we do at Golden Bean besides win awards? Where are these events hosted? Who competes? Today, we’re going to to give you a behind the scenes look into our favorite competition.

Golden Bean is an Australia-based competition for coffee roasters. These days it has a North American branch, and that’s the one we won three times. Every year, the event takes place in a different city. There is also a World Series branch of the competition: to qualify for entry of that event you have to have won a gold or silver medal in a previous Golden Bean. Competing in the World Series means going up against the best coffee roasters from Australia, East Asia, and North America.

Roasters can submit coffees into the five-day-long competition, but they also get to attend the whole event if they want. Each day there are coffee talks from leading industry experts, and each night there are social events. Roasters from all over get to meet one another, network, and talk shop.

But, most importantly, everyone gets to taste coffees!

There are three categories of judging at Golden Bean: milk, espresso, and filter. Everyone in attendance gets to take part in the judging. All the coffees are scored in a preliminary blind tasting which everyone in attendance gets to take part in! Your coffees are judged by your peers which we think is pretty cool. Then the high scorers move on to compete head to head. Those are judged by high-level judges. The golden bean goes to the roaster that scores the highest across all three categories.

You can probably tell by reading this that Golden Bean is a huge event, and we often get to be involved in other ways besides tasting. There’s a behind-the-scenes engine room where all the coffees are brewed for judging. This is a crucial part to the competition running smoothly, and it’s staffed with coffee professionals from all over who are expert at brewing coffee and pulling espresso. In the past, someone from BonLife has worked in this room, dialing in each espresso and pulling a crazy amount of shots in a short amount of time.

When it’s time to announce the winners of the competition, there is a themed awards night. Attendants get to dress up, and it’s a big party. BonLife staff have attended western, 80s, space, prom, and Hawaiian themed awards nights. And, not to toot our own horn, but we won awards at each one!

At the end of the day, we have enjoyed every competition we’ve been a part of. But Golden Bean has won our hearts because of how chill and fun yet professional it is. We really enjoy the time spent talking with other roasters and coffee shop owners from all over the world. And of course we never get tired of tasting the best coffees around!

We’ll see you all next month at Golden Bean Worlds!