International Coffee Tasting
International Coffee Tasting — usually shortened to ICT — is a competition for roasted coffee run by the International Institute of Coffee Tasters (IIAC), the Italian sensory body.1 IIAC calls it its most important and most widely known event.23
The thing to understand first is what is being judged. Best of Panama and Cup of Excellence judge green coffee from a single farm and end in an auction with a public price per kilo. ICT judges the finished product a company sells — a bag of beans, a capsule, an espresso blend — and ends in a medal. There is no auction, no price, and no first place. You either clear the bar or you don’t, which makes it structurally closer to the Good Food Awards than to anything with a hammer price.
Medals, not scores
Entries are awarded at Platinum and Gold level.45 “IIAC gold medal” is the phrase that ends up on packaging.
Coffees are entered by category rather than thrown into one pool, so a capsule is never judged against an espresso blend. The categories seen in ICT material are Single Serve (capsules and pods), Whole Beans, Filter, Automatic Coffee Machine, Italian Espresso and International Espresso.6
Two of those names are quietly revealing. Splitting Italian Espresso from International Espresso means the competition treats “espresso” as two different products with two different correct answers — the Italian one measured against a defined national style, everything else measured on its own terms. And Automatic Coffee Machine as a judged category means a coffee is being assessed as it comes out of a bean-to-cup machine, which is how an enormous share of the world’s coffee is actually made and which almost no other competition scores at all.
To verify — how a coffee is actually scored
ICT’s site references a scoring calculation but publishes no cupping form, no scale, no medal threshold and no jury composition that could be read, and none of the IIAC material consulted supplies them either. That means no numerical result for any ICT coffee appears anywhere in this note, and none should be quoted from elsewhere without a primary document. The one panel figure found is historical: the 2014 edition is described as having used 26 international judges. Compare Coffee scoring and the Coffee Value Assessment, where the forms are public documents — here they are not.
The Asia turn
ICT began as an Italian competition and moved east. The pivot is dated and documented: in November 2013 the competition was held in Tokyo, described in IIAC’s own newsletter as taking the contest “to one of the most definitely interesting areas for the world of coffee: Asia”.
It kept going. The 2015 Asian edition was staged in Taiwan on 1–2 December; the 2017 edition ran in Guangzhou, China. By 2025 the competition was running several sessions a year across Italy, Korea and China, with the Chinese sessions in May, July, August, October and December and an Italian session in February. ICT’s own results are organised by year — ICT 2024, ICT 2025, ICT 2026 — with records on the site going back to 2017.
Five sessions a year in China against one in Italy is not a competition with a Chinese edition. It is a competition that has largely relocated. Set that beside the China coffee market note: a European institution with an espresso-shaped definition of quality found its growth in the market that was building café culture fastest, and 7Fresh Coffee putting “IIAC gold medal” on its packaging is the downstream consequence.
The 2017 Guangzhou edition
This is the one edition where a full picture survives in IIAC’s own newsletter:
| Host city | Guangzhou, China |
| Entries | 162 coffees |
| Countries entering | 9 — Australia, Canada, China, Italy, Japan, Korea, Spain, Taiwan, Thailand |
| Gold medals awarded | 39 |
| Countries taking gold | 7 — Italy, Canada, China, Korea, Spain, Taiwan, Thailand |
| Categories | Filter, Automatic Coffee Machine, Single Serve, Italian Espresso, International Espresso |
Thirty-nine golds from 162 entries is roughly one entry in four. That is a threshold award being handed out generously, not a podium — worth remembering whenever a bag claims one. Note also who is absent from the medal list: Australia and Japan entered and took no gold, and no coffee-producing country appears at all. Every medalling nation is a roasting and consuming country, which is exactly what you would expect from a contest judging finished retail product rather than farm lots.
To verify — how many editions there have been, and which one this was
The Guangzhou event is called “the eleventh edition” in IIAC’s newsletter, but that article is headed “International Coffee Tasting Asia 2017”, and it is not clear whether the number counts the whole competition or the Asian series that began in Tokyo in 2013. Separately, a retailer’s overview page7 claims that “for more than 15 years, the previous twelve editions have tasted over 2,100 different coffees.” That is a single commercial source, it cannot be reconciled with a competition now running five or more sessions in a single year, and the founding year of the competition is not stated in any primary source consulted. Do not infer a start date from it, and do not attach an edition number to a year.
What it does not tell you
For a reader used to the rest of this wiki, the gaps are the story. ICT results consulted here carry no farm names, no altitudes, no varieties, no processing methods, no harvest years, no cupping scores and no prices. A gold medal names a company’s product, and the chain back to whoever grew the coffee is not published.
This is not a flaw so much as a different job. Cup of Excellence exists to get money to a specific farmer by making their lot findable and biddable. ICT exists to tell a roaster’s customers that trained tasters approved the bag. Both are real; only one of them is traceable.
To verify — any link to green-coffee competitions
Nothing in IIAC’s or ICT’s public material connects the competition to Best of Panama, Cup of Excellence, the Alliance for Coffee Excellence, the Specialty Coffee Association or the Coffee Quality Institute, and no such relationship should be assumed. An “IIAC gold medal” claim on a product — such as the one on 7Fresh Coffee’s beans — is not evidence of a placing in any of those.
Related
- International Institute of Coffee Tasters — the body that runs it
- Espresso Italiano Tasting — the tasting method and book behind the judging
- Good Food Awards — the closest analogue: a threshold medal for roasted coffee, no ranking, no price
- Best of Panama · Cup of Excellence · Panama Cup — the green-coffee auction model, for contrast
- World Barista Championship · World Brewers Cup — competitions judging people rather than products
- Cupping · Coffee scoring · Coffee Value Assessment · Q Grader — the public scoring systems ICT does not use
- 7Fresh Coffee · JD.com · China coffee market — where ICT medals show up on packaging
- Japan coffee market · Illy — the Italian-espresso export current the competition rides
- Premiumisation — why a medal without a score still sells
Official links
- Official site — International Coffee Tasting
- Official — International Coffee Tasting, the competition
- Official — International Coffee Tasting, the association
- Official — IIAC, International Institute of Coffee Tasters