This Coffee Blogger's Championship Victory Perfectly Embodies the Essence of Barista Competitions!

A New Champion Emerges at the US Barista Championship

The United States Barista Championship recently concluded, with Morgan Eckroth of Portland, Oregon, taking home the crown. Unlike many past competitors in major barista competitions, Morgan was already a coffee blogger with over 7 million followers before she even entered.

From left to right: Brooke Wolfe, Morgan Eckroth, Elisabeth Johnson

So from the moment she announced her participation, she documented the entire preparation process through vlogs. On competition day, she even live-streamed the whole event to share with her online followers. With millions of fans watching at once, she wasn't nervous, but the judges must have been feeling the pressure too.

A Championship Focused on Home Coffee Brewing

For this competition, Morgan chose a theme centered on the home-brewing community that emerged after the pandemic, hoping the coffee she created could be easily made by anyone at home. Unlike the approach of previous competitors, Morgan shared her drink ideas and recipes on social platforms during the preparation stage.

She did this so her fans could make and taste the coffee along with her. In her view, coffee should be about good flavor, reproducibility, and innovation, a creative coffee concept that can be easily made and enjoyed at home.

In many barista championships we've seen, competitors seem incredibly skilled, but many often focus too much on the uniqueness of their drinks and the performance of the preparation. The coffee beans, brewing and extraction methods, and other materials they choose are often difficult for others to replicate.

At the same time, because of the exquisite flavors of the Geisha variety, competitors over the years have invested heavily in micro-lots and custom lots of Geisha for their bean selection. That means after the competition, it's impossible for people to find those standout beans, and no other variety can offer a similar flavor profile.

Generous prizes but no real improvement in competition quality; competitions dominated by Geisha; a lack of relevant competition experience; excessive focus on origin, variety, and cultivation technique; and complex scoring systems that cause many judges to "miss" potential competitors (this isn't to say the judges are unprofessional); creative coffee no longer being creative; and basic work skills being overlooked. These have all become problems in barista competitions.

Emerging Coffee Varieties in Competition

Of course, with quality steadily improving, starting from 2020 we've gradually noticed many competitors using varieties other than Geisha, though these remain relatively rare. For example, 2021 WBC champion Diego Campos and WBrC champion Matt Winton used Coffea Eugenioides, the parent species of Arabica, originally from East Africa.

The leaves and coffee fruits of this variety are smaller than Arabica's. Although growing it isn't especially difficult, its yield is indeed lower than Arabica, and it's still considered a rare or experimental coffee. The variety itself is sweet (perhaps because of the lower presence of caffeine's bitterness), and tasting notes describe cheerful, unusual flavors like sesame candy, toasted marshmallow, lemon, and grain milk.

Returning to Morgan, she also used this variety for the milk coffee segment. She used Eugenioides beans from San Jaen Farm in Colombia, extracting 35g of liquid from 20g of grounds and pairing it with 50% frozen purified milk to maximize the variety's sweetness. The milk coffee overall displayed cocoa, egg custard, chocolate ice cream, and salty caramel.

For the espresso and creative coffee segments, though, Morgan chose the more common Rume Sudan variety, also from San Jaen Farm in Colombia and processed using the anaerobic natural method. 19g of grounds extracted 40g of liquid in 20 seconds. Before tasting, judges had to stir 10 times with a frozen cup spoon. The espresso overall displayed rose, red grapefruit, honey syrup, papaya, and white peach.

Creative Coffee with a Replicable Recipe

The creative coffee also used the espresso recipe as a base. Morgan added that the espresso with floral and tropical fruit notes could be replicated with similar solutions using different beans. Every detail was designed so fans could make a creative coffee with similar results at home.

Four shots of espresso plus 30g of mango purée create orange-ice-cream-like flavors. Then she added 25g of lime essential oil made by mixing lime peel and white sugar in a 1:1 ratio and maturing it for 8 hours before extraction, 30g of orange blossom water that creates rose-water flavors when combined with espresso, and finally a portion of egg white for texture plus a portion of salt water to enhance the sweetness of all the ingredients and achieve a more uniform flavor.

Finally, the ingredients were blended evenly, then ice was added and the mixture shaken to cool. The creative coffee overall displayed orange ice cream, yuzu, lemon sorbet, and a rose water aroma.

Although the recipe looks complex, compared with many competition creative coffees it has high playability. In daily life, we can find similar raw materials to adjust the recipe and make coffee with comparable flavors. Creative coffee is about highlighting the flavor characteristics of the coffee itself through other ingredients.

A Changing Coffee Culture in the Post-Pandemic Era

In her competition speech, Morgan said that during the pandemic people couldn't consume in stores, which gave rise to a large number of home brewers. Everyone started digging into coffee and pushing its boundaries with their own abilities, which also encouraged more coffee bloggers to emerge. As a member of that community, she takes it as her mission to share professional coffee knowledge and promote specialty coffee.

After following Morgan's competition, the writer strongly agrees with her understanding of the industry. To help more people fall in love with specialty coffee and learn more about it, we can't do without baristas properly spreading coffee culture.

Professional coffee knowledge and an understanding of extraction principles are essential conditions for being a barista. When facing beginners who want to learn about coffee, what baristas need to do is simplify complex knowledge through understanding before expressing and communicating it.

Every profession has its specialization, and different fields are as different as mountains. Not every coffee drinker has an in-depth understanding of coffee culture and knowledge. If everything must be explained from a highly technical angle, it will only drive more people away.

In the post-pandemic era, more coffee bloggers have risen across social platforms, which means the coffee market is transforming. From in-store consumption to home brewing, consumer habits have shifted significantly. Going to a coffee shop is about experiencing the professionalism of baristas, while learning to brew at home is about being able to easily drink good coffee without going out.

Does this shift affect coffee shops? Times change and business models change with them. If you stay in a pre-pandemic mode of waiting for customers to come and experience your professionalism, it may cost you. But if you're willing to step out of your comfort zone and share your expertise through other means, you might gain more business, because letting netizens from different cities see and remember you is genuinely valuable.

In barista competitions that blindly chase uniqueness and coffee others can't replicate, Morgan's performance better demonstrated the generosity, confidence, and passion a professional barista should have.

Conclusion

Image source: Internet, MorganDrinksCoffee

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

Morgan's approach, sharing coffee anyone can brew at home, is exactly the spirit behind FrontStreet Coffee's entry-level range. If you want to taste the Geisha experience she championed, FrontStreet Coffee's Boquete Geisha is a great starting point, offering the classic Panama Geisha orange-blossom-honey sweetness and delicate fruit at a manageable price.

For a broader tour of the origins her competitors drew on, FrontStreet Coffee's Yunnan Small-Bean and washed Ethiopian lots cover two ends of the spectrum. The Yunnan Small-Bean brings soft nut and chocolate sweetness with light plum acidity, while the Ethiopian selections deliver jasmine florals and bright citrus. Both are approachable enough for anyone following along at home.