The roasting team at Canterbury’s Vivace Espresso has just received three Bronze Medals to add to their packaging for blends judged at the world’s largest coffee roasting competition, the Golden Bean Awards in Australia.
Held in Sydney, the Golden Bean Awards involved professional roasters blind-tasting blends from Australia and New Zealand and marking them on a points-based scoreboard across ten categories, and against criteria such as sweetness, acidity, body, balance and aftertaste.
Senior Roaster at Vivace Espresso Cameron Hoogervorst.
Senior Roaster at Vivace Espresso, Cameron Hoogervorst, said the team entered the competition just to give it a go.
“We wanted to test our coffees and see how they would match against our friends across the ditch,” said Hoogervorst. With a few thousand Bronze stickers having now arrived to add to their coffee bags, the public will soon be able to test their own palettes against the Ultimate Espresso and Union blends, which were recognised in the Milk Based category as well as Vivace’s Organic blend, which placed in the Espresso category.
While the Vivace team has entered other international competitions it was their first time at the Golden Bean.
“Preparing for the competition involved our every-day routine of roasting, blending and tasting for continuous improvement,” said Hoogervorst.
“We are always evolving our taste and it is reassuring to get feedback in forums like this that we are on the right track. Unfortunately we didn’t receive the scorecards to see our exact score but we will keep on perfecting our blends and hope to return to the Golden Bean to compete and judge next year because that will assist us in developing our palette and help evolve our coffee,” he said.
The competition, in its twelfth year in Australia, attracts attendance from over 100 coffee roasting businesses and runs a number of educational workshops and social functions. It is also in its fourth year in North America.
