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

A New Champion Emerges at the US Barista Championship

Recently, the United States Barista Championship concluded with Morgan Eckroth from Portland, Oregon taking home the crown. Unlike many previous competitors in major barista competitions, Morgan was already a coffee blogger with over 7 million followers before even entering the competition.

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

Therefore, from the moment she announced her participation in the US Barista Championship, she documented the entire preparation process through vlogs. On competition day, she even live-streamed the entire event to share with her online followers! With millions of fans watching simultaneously, she wasn't nervous, but the judges must have been quite tense too, haha...

A Championship Focused on Home Coffee Brewing

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

Morgan did this hoping that her fans could make and taste the coffee along with her. She expressed that 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 in the past, everyone feels that the competitors are incredibly skilled. However, many competitors often focus too much on the uniqueness of their drinks and the performance aspect of the preparation process. The selection of coffee beans, brewing/extraction methods, and other materials chosen are often difficult for others to replicate.

Meanwhile, due to the exquisite coffee flavors of the Geisha coffee variety, competitors over the years have invested heavily in micro-lots/custom lots of Geisha for their bean selection. This means that after the competition, it's impossible for people to find these outstanding coffee beans, and no other coffee varieties can offer similar flavor profiles.

Generous prizes but no substantial improvement in competition quality; competitions dominated by Geisha coffee varieties; lack of relevant competition experience, excessive focus on origin, variety, cultivation techniques, and complex scoring systems that cause many judges to "miss" more potential coffee competitors (this is not to say that the judges are unprofessional); creative coffee no longer being creative; basic work skills being overlooked—these have all become problems in barista competitions.

Emerging Coffee Varieties in Competition

Of course, with the continuous improvement in coffee variety quality, starting from 2020, we've gradually noticed many competitors beginning to use coffee varieties other than Geisha, although these are still relatively rare varieties... For example, the 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. Although growing it is not particularly difficult, their yield is indeed lower than Arabica, and this variety is still considered a rare or experimental coffee cultivation. The variety itself is sweet (perhaps due to the less presence of caffeine's bitterness), and flavor evaluations mention that this coffee has cheerful, unusual flavors like sesame candy, toasted marshmallow, lemon, and grain milk.

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

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

Creative Coffee with Replicable Recipes

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

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

Finally, mix all ingredients evenly with a blender, then add ice and shake to cool. The creative coffee overall displayed flavors of orange ice cream, yuzu, lemon sorbet, and rose water aroma.

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

Changing Coffee Culture in the Post-Pandemic Era

In Morgan's competition speech, she said: During the pandemic, people couldn't consume in stores, which gave rise to a large number of home coffee brewers. Everyone started delving into coffee and expanding its boundaries with their abilities. This also promoted the emergence of more coffee bloggers. As a member of the coffee blogger community, she takes it as her mission to share professional coffee knowledge and promote specialty coffee.

After watching Morgan's competition process, I (the writer) strongly agree with Morgan's understanding of the coffee industry. To get more people to fall in love with specialty coffee and learn more coffee knowledge, we cannot separate it from the proper dissemination of coffee culture by baristas.

Professional coffee knowledge and understanding of coffee extraction principles are essential conditions for being a barista. When facing beginners who want to know/learn about coffee, what baristas need to do is to properly 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/knowledge. If everything must be explained and communicated from a very professional perspective, it will only lead to more people giving up on this matter.

In the post-pandemic era, various social platforms have seen the rise of more coffee bloggers, which means the coffee market is undergoing transformation. From in-store consumption to home brewing, coffee consumers' consumption patterns have also undergone significant changes. Going to coffee shops to drink coffee is about experiencing the professionalism of baristas, while learning to make coffee at home is about being able to easily drink good coffee without going out.

So does this consumption pattern affect coffee shops? Times are changing, and business models are also changing. If you still remain in the pre-pandemic mode of waiting for customers to come and experience your professionalism, it might have an impact. But if you're willing to step out of your comfort zone and share your expertise with everyone through other means, you might get more business, because it's a very valuable thing to let netizens from different cities see you and remember you.

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

Conclusion

Image source: Internet, MorganDrinksCoffee

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