Head Bean – Sean Edwards
This year’s Golden Bean goes to Coffee Tech from New Zealand. Alan Zuo and his team not only won the overall champion, he also took out the Small Franchise trophy. Alan will now take Coffee Tech to represent Asia Pacific in the World Finals against North America in Hawaii.
The Large Franchise trophy went to Black Bag Roasters - Roasting for Aldi. This is the fourth win for the Melbourne-based roaster and a record for the Golden Bean awards. Let’s give them a big congratulations, and it will be good to see them also in Hawaii competing against other large Franchise winners.
The event was attended by over 100 industry representatives who helped judge the 815 submitted coffees. The event was also well represented by our sponsors and industry suppliers who all presented over the four days of the conference and competition. This years’ speakers focused on the recovery processes of returning to top business normality, in fact there was lots of discussion around this topic throughout the entire event.
The Golden Bean was open this year to include Asia and we had entries from China, Korea and Singapore. One of our head judges, Frankie Shi, well supported the Chinese roaster with understanding the logistics of the event. We have been excitedly awaiting the end of Covid to be able to follow our vision of making Golden Bean a true global event by holding heats in different countries. We are now eager to head to Kona in Hawaii on the 29th of November to run the Golden Bean World Series.
It was great to see the Australasian Awards Ceremony back to full scale, and this years’ theme was to celebrate the ‘Eighties’, so we had appearances from Madonna, Slash, Mad Max and Crocodile Dundee. It was so good to also hear the chinking of medals again and see the proud faces of the winning roasters!
Medal winners for each Category are available to see here: https://goldenbean.com.au/pages/2022-winners
A big Thank You again to the judges, sponsors, Port Macquarie community, volunteers and the Café Culture Team.