Royal Adelaide Coffee Show — Australia's Oldest Agricultural Exhibition

About the award

The Royal Adelaide Show has been running since 1839. The coffee competition is a more recent addition — it grew out of the Royal Adelaide Fine Food Awards, which historically judged everything from cheese to bread, and split coffee out as its own competitive class once the South Australian roasting scene was large enough to support a dedicated category.

The format differs from the Golden Bean in one important way: medals here are scarce. Where the Golden Bean awards Bronze freely as a quality-threshold marker, the RACS awards Bronze to entries that genuinely placed — typically the third-best in their category.

Categories include Espresso Single Origin, Espresso Blend, Plunger Single Origin, Latte Blend, Latte Single Origin, and Piccolo Imported Blend. Each is judged blind by a panel of professional cuppers drawn mostly from the local industry, with occasional interstate guests.

How it's judged

RACS uses standard blind cupping methodology drawn from the SCA protocol — uniform grind size, fixed ratio, 93°C water, four-minute steep, scoring on the 100-point cupping scale. Panels typically include three to five judges per category. Identifying information is stripped from entries before judging.

Unlike the Golden Bean, RACS publishes per-category point scores in the show catalogue for the top placings, so it's possible to compare how close the field was in any given category — useful context that most other Australian competitions don't provide.