The Golden Bean Awards — Australia's Largest Coffee Roasting Competition

About the award

Founded in 2009 by Coffee Magazine on the Gold Coast, the Golden Bean started as a regional competition for the Pacific roasting scene and grew into the biggest event of its kind in the southern hemisphere. The format has stayed deliberately simple: roasters submit coffees in defined categories — Espresso, Milk-Based, Filter, Cold Brew, and more — and the entries are scored blind by panels of cuppers across a single judging week.

The "blind" part matters more than people realise. Judges don't see the roaster's name, the brand, or even the country of origin. They taste a numbered cup and rate it. That's the whole reason the awards carry weight: marketing budget doesn't help you here.

What makes Golden Bean different from most Australian shows is the scale. A single year typically produces 20+ Gold medals, 60+ Silvers, and several hundred Bronzes spread across a dozen-plus categories. The Bronze in particular is a participation-threshold medal — entries that clear a quality benchmark (around 80+ points on the 100-point scale) get one. Silvers are reserved for the genuinely standout cups in their category, and a Gold means the panel kept coming back to that cup across multiple rounds of tasting.

The competition also produces a Champion Coffee for the year — the single coffee that scored highest across the entire competition. That title carries enough weight that some roasters build their whole year's product launch around it.

Categories shift year-on-year as the industry evolves. The Espresso category has been there since the start; Alternative Milk has emerged in the last few years; Decaf has become its own competitive class as decaf-drinkers stopped settling for the spare bag in the cupboard. The Golden Bean has been responsive in a way that most international competitions aren't.

How it's judged

Cupping is the standard methodology — coffees are ground at a uniform grind size, dosed at a fixed water-to-coffee ratio, brewed by adding hot water (around 93°C) to the grounds, and tasted after a four-minute steep. Panels of five or more judges score each cup independently on aroma, flavour, acidity, body, balance, and aftertaste. Scores are aggregated and outliers are dropped.

The judges are working roasters and trained baristas — the people who actually drink this stuff for a living. Their identity is published; the roaster's identity isn't. The result is a list of medallists that reflects what's good to other roasters, not what's marketable.