Coffee Conversations: Morgan Eckroth on Judging Coffee Competitions

I find coffee competitions fascinating, probably because the idea of competing in one is so completely alien to me. It’s like giving a presentation mixed with a job interview mixed with a performance review all rolled into one, sometimes on camera—I’m not sure I can think of something I would be less suited to.

I have written about competitions before, specifically the cost associated with taking part (which can be astronomical). But I’m also interested in the mechanics, and when I saw that Morgan Eckroth was taking time off from competing to judge competitions, I thought this might be an opportunity to learn more about how it all works.

Eckroth has a lot of experience with coffee competitions. As well as winning the 2022 United States Barista Championship, Eckroth came second in the World Barista Championship that year and finished as runner-up at both the 2023 and 2024 U.S Barista Championships.

This is in addition to being a YouTube and TikTok star, with 1.4 million and 6.6 million followers on those platforms respectively (plus over a million on Instagram). Eckroth merged these two worlds in 2022, posting a series of videos in the lead-up to the competitions talking about their preparation as well as live-streaming their routine on YouTube and following up with a Q&A video detailing their experience. They also write a very good newsletter, which I recommend subscribing to.

This year, Eckroth decided to take a break from competing, but instead of actually taking a break they decided to pick up a clipboard and start judging instead. I spoke to Eckroth about the move, what judging entails, and how others can take part.

This interview has been lightly condensed and edited for clarity.

You said you took the competition season off to do judging. What was the reason behind that?

A big aspect of it was just needing a break. Having competed for five seasons in a row, especially with the World Barista Championship being nestled in there somewhere, I don't think in the last five years I've had a time off from preparing for competition. I love the process, like when you get in the weeds of drink creation, script building, and all of that—it’s so much fun—but it does blossom into a job in and of itself.

Another big component of it was just kind of needing a different perspective on competition as a competitor. Like the way you know the rule sheets and the way you prepare is very specific, and I just felt myself hitting a wall. I feel like I've kind of maxed out what I can do on my own, and I need something fresh to kind of get me restarted.

And then the third aspect of it was just wanting to be able to be involved and give back to the competition in a different way. The competitions are fully volunteer-run, and it can't happen without the judges. And so I had this sense of needing to give back in a different way, especially if I already knew I was going to be taking the time off.

You started judging in the qualifiers—is that kind of how it works? You have to pay your dues as it were, locally, and then you can work your way up?

Essentially, yeah. To judge at a qualifier event, it's totally open. It's just a matter of registering and being there, which is great. We have a fantastic team of judges in the U.S. that will get you fully trained up from scratch.

It was so much fun being at qualifiers—as a competitor, I kind of knew what I was getting into, but it was incredible to watch people come in to judge who just saw a listing for a coffee competition that needed judges, and watching them within 24 hours get brought into shape and feeling confident and ready to judge. So at the lower level, it's a mix of whoever wants to start building that skill, and then for the national level, it is invite only.

You actually had to go do training to be a judge, and that involves calibration with the other judges as well. What was that like?

Prior to the competition starting, usually the day before a competition weekend, is what's called calibration day. So we as judges come in and basically have an all day intensive that touches on every single part of the rule sheet.

It's like nine to five, doing very focused work on understanding the different courses, understanding judge language, terminology, doing mock run-throughs with calibration baristas, and then also making sure that you are all speaking the same language when it comes to flavour. And then at the start of every competition morning, prior to the judging officially beginning, we'll also do another calibration, just to make sure we're all aligned with our palates.

And you were doing this with people who I presume were, even if they had just seen a flyer somewhere, still coffee professionals, or was it just literally anybody?

It's primarily coffee professionals. Typically, it'll be folks who have had maybe an interest in competitions, but don't really want to compete. It's a nice way to be involved and to start understanding competition without that much larger stress.

But it's not rare to see someone come in who has no coffee experience, and I think that's the really cool thing about this kind of lower-level and lower-stakes competition, is we still have a very qualified team of judges that are supporting everyone.

We had one person in our group at one of the qualifiers this year, who just liked coffee and thought it would be a fun thing to try, and she really connected with the technical side of judging and being a tech judge. It went from her having not seen WDT [Weiss Distribution Technique, a method for evenly distributing ground espresso] or that sort of puck prep before, to by the end of the weekend being able to fill out and accurately do a full tech sheet.

What was the tasting calibration like?

That was the most interesting part to me, and it’s primarily due to how the barista competition rules have changed in recent years. Judge calibration [has become] a lot more streamlined, just because when we're back there getting the training, it's less about, do you have a lexicon of every flavour that's ever existed and are those flavour notes accurate to the coffee that we are giving you to taste?

The other portion of the calibration that's really interesting, especially for espresso, is based around taste experience, [and] thinking about quality and intensity of different coffee attributes—specifically, sweetness, bitterness and acidity. And it's not asking, what does this acidity taste like in terms of flavour? But asking, is it of quality, and also, what is the intensity of it? What is it doing in terms of motion through each sip? Is it rising in intensity? Lowering?

So that's the sort of language that they’re really trying to get you to start speaking in during calibration. It's much less of, are we all tasting the exact same flavour? And much more, can we describe coffee similarly? Can we describe a flavour story in two sips? That's really what we're trying to hone in on.

Did you find that being a competitor previously gave you a sort of advantage? Or not an advantage, but like, did you kind of get it straight away when you were being talked through all this stuff?

Honestly? Not really. It was very helpful to have knowledge of the competition, and I didn't really need the context that a lot of other people were receiving as part of the training. But understanding what calibrated language is, and not just using it, but beginning to think about coffee in terms of it as I was tasting, that was really the tough thing for me to overcome. And it was kind of like unlearning an old habit to build a new one, where some people just got to build that new one.

So you had the training, you did your calibration, and then you judged the regionals. What was that like?

First of all: so much fun. It was a fantastic time. I think I honestly had just as much fun judging as I do competing. But I was nervous for my first routine! We were all lined up, we’re holding our clipboards, got our aprons on, getting ready to walk out, and I was feeling those butterflies that I would traditionally feel prior to competing.

For me, it was this pressure of knowing how much work the competitors had put in to their routines and how important the next 15 minutes are going to be, and realising that I'm the one writing those scores and those notes, and it's going to impact their progress, and wanting to do right by them in my role as a judge.

Thankfully, everything went great, and it was fun and awesome, but it's a lot of work judging. It's something I have kind of known for a long time, like I understand how much work they're doing on the stage along with you, but to actually experience it, and to have to be the person evaluating at that speed,all of that is just such an interesting dynamic to engage with on the stage.

And it kind of reframes a barista’s routine—less like it's just a competitor presenting to judges; it's really this kind of dance. It's very much a partnership on stage.

It’s also quite a lot of responsibility, right? These competitors have been practicing for a long time. Did you feel that, like, “I've been there, I know how stressed they must be in this situation”?

Oh, so much so. As a judge, we want the competitors to do as well as they can possibly do, but at the same time, you are there to be objective. So in those moments where things potentially go wrong in their routine, it's a little heartbreaking, but at the same time, it's not your job to compensate for something that happened on their side of the table. And so there's a lot of nervousness, but you just have to kind of separate your brain out.

I presume you will go back to competing in the future. Have you taken any lessons away from judging that you can use in the future?

Definitely. As a competitor, when I read the rules, I was reading the same words the judges were, but I was applying so much more emotion to it, because I have all these things I want them to feel and take away from the routine. But from a judge's perspective, it's very clear what you're evaluating. It's very clear what can go on that score sheet and what can't. And I think really understanding that is going to be very helpful to go back to creating a routine and really tailoring it to those score sheets in a way that I don't think I had been.

And I think also, as I talked about before, the dance that has to happen between competitors and judges, having a more realised understanding of that is going to be super helpful for me as a competitor. Just in like, how do I pace out a routine? What's going to make the judges the most comfortable?

Do you think it's an advantage to have done this, compared to people you're competing against who have never done it? Do you think you get a different perspective on it, or do you think it actually might make you overthink things too much?

We’ll find out! But I think it's a great thing to add to your toolkit. You know, for me, it was really, really hard to make the decision that I was going to judge and take a year off. There was this fear that if I took the year off from competing, I was going to lose momentum, or I was going to forget how to do it. But the minute I made that decision, and the minute I judged for the very first time at a qualifier, I felt like I walked away with so much more inspiration and knowledge than I had had in a really long time.

And so, whether it's a really tangible advantage over another competitor, I don't know. I imagine it very much depends from person to person, but just for me, personally, it has helped me feel more confident and creatively inspired to go back to competing.

Before we finish, is there anything you’d like to add or that I haven’t asked you yet?

My biggest thing in competition nowadays, especially being a little bit more behind the scenes with the judging side, is just grasping how kind of grassroots these competitions are, and especially them being volunteer-led organisations.

I sometimes see discussions happening online or wherever, where people are criticising competitions in ways that I feel are unfair to the people volunteering their time. There's a lot of really valid criticism that can be levied at competitions as an entity—you know, what are we propping up? What are we valuing? But separately from that, the people that are working to put these on are doing it out of their own free time, and out of just kind of like a love for the game.

I think recognising and kind of acknowledging that is really important to me. There's a lot to criticise here, there's a lot to discuss here, this is a format that is ever evolving and trying to improve. But at its core, especially at the national levels, it's these groups of people that really want to support specialty coffee, and I think that's something that's hard to see sometimes from the outside.