Oat Milk decided for Golden Bean 2025 competition

Congratulations – The Alternative Dairy Co™

Each year we put forward products that we would like to use to make The Golden Bean a stronger, fairer consumer competition. We recently had our Roaster Engage event inBrisbane at The Coffee Commune where we tested 3 leading oat milk brands with 30national and local coffee roasters being our judges.

We completed a blind cupping of leading café barista oat milks, Oatley, Milk Lab oat and The Alternative Dairy Co ™ oat. We served the judges the drinks made as a Piccolo Latte with 20 gram shot of milk-based coffee with 50 grams of Oat milk. Dr Ainsley Harrison of Peak Coffee wanted the coffee to dominate the drink picking a good performing coffee. The judges were looking for a neutral milk that had good mouthfeel and a coffee aftertaste. The coffees were all made in groups of eight, so all temperatures remained the same.

The judges push forward the cup they liked after the tasting, and the cups were removed and codes underneath each cup was recorded.

All the milks performed well as these three leading brands have been well tested in theAustralian market and are all great café oat milks the test results from the 30 judges were:

The Alternative Dairy Co ™ – 14 likes

Oatly ™ – 8 Likes

Milk Lab™ – 8 Likes

Congratulations to The Alternative Dairy Co™ for winning our test and we are looking forward to the brand joining us for Golden Bean Australasia again in 2025. We would like to thank all the roasters who attended the Roaster Engage event talking about trends and movement in the roasting side of the coffee business. We will be conducting a Dairy Milk test in April this year in Sydney.

Dates for this year’s Golden Bean Australasia Competition is the 17th to the 21st of June 2025 in Port Macquarie at the Golf Club.

Disclaimer: The taste tests carry out were with the sole purpose of finding the preferred oat milk of the Australian coffee roasters community for Golden Bean competition purposes. No company was favoured in this independent test and all coffee science parameters were followed to make this test transparent and fair. The management team made the choice of oat milk that were tested and purchased the milks from distributors without the companies’ owners being subject to this process. Golden Bean prides itself to be the leading global resource for consumer coffee judging and ancillary café products and equipment.

Contact – sean@cafeculture.com