an organization · SCSouth Carolina Barbeque Association

A judging body and booster founded in 2004 by Lake E. High Jr., a wine judge, and Walter Rolandi, a psychologist, 'to train the best BBQ judges in the world and to preserve and promote the unique nature of South Carolina Barbecue'. It runs judging seminars in Columbia that turn eaters into certified judges — more than 800 by 2015 — sanctions cook-offs across the state, eight of them listed between September 12 and October 24, 2026, and keeps a points championship for the teams. Its account of the state's barbecue is Lake High's: South Carolina as the home of all four sauces — mustard, vinegar-pepper, light tomato and heavy tomato — mapped by region.

When High and Rolandi founded the association, South Carolina had two barbecue cook-offs a year; by 2015 it had thirty-seven, more per head than any other state, and the association's judge-training system was being copied elsewhere. High is its historian as well as its founder. His A History of South Carolina Barbeque (2013) and the association's history page hold that Europeans first learned barbecue from the Native Americans at Santa Elena, the sixteenth-century colony in what is now South Carolina; that vinegar-and-pepper is the original sauce, hundreds of years old; that mustard came with the German settlers of the 1730s to 1750s; that light tomato is vinegar-and-pepper with ketchup added, from around 1900; and that heavy tomato is the newest, of the last sixty years. Only South Carolina, the page says, is home to all four. Robert Moss, another South Carolinian, counts two — sweet mustard and spicy vinegar — and the state's Wikipedia article gives both counts, along with the four-or-five-region division first drawn by Charles Kovacik and John Winberry in South Carolina: A Geography (1987). High's line, to South Carolina Living in 2015: 'Barbeque is a noun, not a verb. It's something Southerners eat, not do.' In August 2018 the association named Jim Wellman of Lexington president and Don Adkins of Seneca vice president.

Judges train at an annual seminar in Columbia and advance through levels; a team enters a sanctioned cook-off, is scored by certified judges, and earns points toward the SCBA Championship. The cook-offs are run by towns, churches, scout troops and civic groups — Troop 61's competition at Pomaria and the Hopeful Hog Festival at Lancaster were on the 2026 list — with the association supplying the judging.

Active. The 2026 calendar lists cook-offs from Mauldin to Barnwell through October 24, the judge seminars are held in Columbia each year, and the association posts from PO Box 115, Blythewood.