Episode 117: Coffee Talk With Morgan Eckroth

Start searching online for creative coffee drinks, and you’ll quickly come across the work of Morgan Eckroth, one of this year’s Imbibe 75 People to Watch. Based in Portland, Oregon, Eckroth is an award-winning barista who took a love of coffee online via an immensely popular series of videos on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. For this episode, we talk with Eckroth about how this route into the online coffee world evolved, how to creatively work coffee into a wide spectrum of recipes, and what to expect from this Imbibe 75er in the years ahead. (You can get Eckroth’s Reading Nook recipe here.)

Radio Imbibe is the audio home of Imbibe magazine. In each episode, we dive into liquid culture, exploring the people, places, and flavors of the drinkscape through conversations about cocktails, coffee, beer, spirits, and wine. Keep up with us on Instagram, Threads, and Facebook. And if you’re not already a subscriber, we’d love to have you join us—click here to subscribe.

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Paul Clarke

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Radio Imbibe from Imbibe magazine. I’m Paul Clark, Imbibe‘s editor in chief.

And if you’ve been a reader of Imbibe for any length of time, whether it’s our print magazine or our website or as a listener to this podcast, you’ll know that while we do love our cocktails and our beer and our wine, coffee is always been at the heart of what Imbibe does on one level or another. Pick up the current issue with our annual Imbibe 75 coverage of the people and places who will change the way we drink in the years ahead, you’ll see a number of great coffee places and really talented coffee professionals as part of that lineup.

One of the individuals featured in this year’s Imbibe 75 is someone who already has a significant audience in the coffee world and in the bigger culinary scene. Morgan Eckroth has been a barista and coffee personality for several years now. While based in Portland, Oregon, and working in the coffee culture there, Morgan has also amassed a mighty online following on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, among other platforms. If you tune into Morgan’s coverage, you’ll find a good mix of coffee content there from details on how to better understand and enjoy coffee to recipes and techniques for making great specialty coffee drinks and some shorter asides that offer some insight into life behind the coffee bar. So this episode, we’re chatting with Morgan Eckroth about how this journey has evolved, what goes into creating some of those awesome-looking coffee drinks, and about life as a barista competition competitor and champion, and about what comes after the competition scene.

Before we get started, a quick note of thanks to this episode’s sponsor, Tito’s Handmade Vodka. Distilled in Texas since the mid-’90s. Tito’s comes in a standard bottle with a simple paper label, so all you pay for is the high-quality vodka inside. Sip American made at its best with Tito’s. Distilled and bottled by Fifth-Generation Inc., Austin, Texas. 40% alcohol by volume distilled from corn. Copyright 2025. Crafted to be savored responsibly. 

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Paul Clarke

Morgan, welcome to Radio Imbibe. 

Morgan Eckroth

Thank you. Very happy to be here. 

Paul Clarke

Absolutely. And you know, we’re having you on the podcast, of course, because we have you in the magazine as part of our Imbibe 75 for 2025. And we always like to explain for our audience a little bit about who you are and what you do. So to bring listeners up to speed. You’re a barista, you’re a coffee professional and have been for several years now. But while many baristas and coffee professionals might typically encounter out there maybe a couple dozen, several dozen people who know their names know they work, for you, it’s more up in the millions, depending on whether we’re talking about your presence on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and so on.

So to start off with, when and why did you first decide to make that step to take your work and your passion for coffee from beyond just simply making coffee every day for people and to share it on a much, much bigger platform. 

Morgan Eckroth

Yeah, absolutely. So I started creating content around coffee back in, I believe it was spring of 2019. At the time I was working as a barista and I was also getting my marketing degree at Oregon State University with the plan that ultimately I would step into some sort of creative or marketing role in the coffee industry after graduation and beginning to do content slash what I was just kind of considering video work was really for me learning the skills of video.

I had a photography background, but you know, 2019 TikTok was starting. It was kind of clear that video was where everything was going. And so for me it was more of a learning exercise. I didn’t expect it to go anywhere like it did. But after a couple of months, you know, there was some some kind of pickup of these sketches and drinks and like some interest in in coffee online, which was super exciting.

And then flash forward, you know, about a year I graduated into the Covid pandemic. So those job options around coffee, food and beverage, like all of that was just kind of gone. My version of staying active in the coffee industry during this time period where there were very few job opportunities, even in just like working as a barista in cafes, was kind of transitioning all the stuff that I was doing on the side, plus all of my coffee work and just transferring it fully online. And so that’s when I started YouTube really started thinking about it a little bit more intentionally about what I was doing and creating. It’s just been that since then. 

Paul Clarke

And you know, early on, like you said, you’re working in cafes and then you started looking at this other kind of direction to go. And also you were in school at the time. At one point early on, you were working as people do before starting your real career and people listening can’t see my air quotes, but you know what I mean. Your real career. But then after taking that step out there into the world, you decided that you kind of needed to keep one foot in the coffee shop in the cafe realm. Why? And how did that happen? 

Morgan Eckroth

As I mentioned before, the timeline was kind of like 2019, working as a barista, doing video content on the side. And then after graduating, my partner and I moved up to Portland and I had left my café job and, you know, the intention was to go to that like kind of the grown-up job. I’m also using air quotes here, but when I when I decided that I wanted to lean into doing the content, there was kind of this like moment where I was sitting there and being like, Well, why can’t I go work as a barista again? Because like, truthfully, I love being like on the floor, working shifts.

Like if I could do that all day, every day and have like a completely sustainable living, I would. And if my body could still do that, I would. So I went back to working part time. I was doing three shifts a week, plus my own content, and I carried that through August of 2023. So after kind of a very brief intermission around 2020, I went back to working as a barista for about three years and loved every second of it. 

Paul Clarke

And, you know, when we’re looking at your online content, now that you’ve kind of like gravitated much more in that kind of direction, you do many different types of things with them online. You have some short videos kind of sharing the many different kinds of customer experiences we encounter on a regular basis. And those are all kind of fun. But you also pass along information and insight that can help your viewers who are not necessarily coffee professionals, become better educated coffee drinkers in a way. What need did you see out there from your own experience in working in coffee for both of these kinds of directions? 

Morgan Eckroth

Absolutely. It’s a really good question and kind of a fun one that I’ve had to ask myself numerous times over kind of the different generations of content I’ve done. When I started specifically on YouTube, which is I think a more developed coffee space, just with the audience being a little bit older, like there’s more interest in that sort of hobbyist content. Like people are kind of clued into that already. I kind of just jumped in to the deep end of coffee immediately.

I was doing gear reviews, I was doing brewing. I was doing the type of educational content that one would consume if you already had a background in coffee. I initially started trying to do that in my short form content as well on TikTok and Instagram, and kind of had this weird realization that a very large majority of my audience on those platforms especially didn’t have this like introductory knowledge of coffee.

These were like, You’re kind of like your Starbucks drinkers. These are people who still gravitated towards really sweet milk drinks, which is like, I love those. I’m so for those. But it was there was just this kind of like gap between what I was trying to say to them and then where they were at.

And so I really shifted towards trying to make as much content that was digestible for people that didn’t know anything about coffee. And I really tried to position myself as wanting to be that like stepping stone. That kind of gets them in the door because there’s so many fantastic educators online. And I kind of realized that where I really wanted to be was with these people who were kind of peeking in the door of specialty coffee and kind of be that person that could push them towards this higher level of understanding. 

Paul Clarke

Right, right. And, you know, we always have to do that. We have to keep the door open, keep new people coming in and learning about this new discovery. And we set the bar too high from the outset. Then, you know, we’re kind of closing everything off to those folks. 

Morgan Eckroth

It’s kind of like that thing of like, there’s no such thing as common sense. Like being in the industry forever. You’re like, Yeah, of course that’s how coffee works and it’s a fruit and all these things and it’s like, not everyone knows that. And that was like a total reframing that had to happen. 

Paul Clarke

And, you know, when we were talking about the coffee drinks that you present in your work, we’re talking about both things like, you know, the classic traditional coffee drinks like espresso and cortado and so on. But really, we’re also getting more into specialty coffee drinks, almost coffee-based cocktails, as some people might think of them when they look at the recipes using cocktail techniques. Here I’m thinking of the drink that you featured online with smoked salted caramel and bananas, or the one we ran in this issue of imbibe. The Navel Duties, which is really …

Morgan Eckroth

Yes. 

Paul Clarke

… kind of like a coffee Mai Tai. And drinks like these are, of course, a part of barista competitions, and we’ll get to that in a moment. And featured menu items in many cafes. Why have you taken such an interest in that side of the coffee equation and making that kind of accessible to people who may not have that kind of specialty background? 

Morgan Eckroth

Yeah, it’s kind of twofold for me. I’m starting to really lean into into sharing more, lack of a better term, like coffee, cocktail content, really for me was for my own benefit of preparing for competition. When I when I started really sharing those, like I’ve been developing signature drinks for many, many years for barista competitions, and I was kind of hitting a creative block about a year and a half ago where I was like, I just I feel like I’m making the same thing constantly and it doesn’t like, you know, I’m not feeling fulfilled in that anymore. And so I looked at this other part of my life that usually wasn’t online and drink making and was like, well, it’s like, let’s like throw something new at the wall and see if it sticks.

So I started developing drinks that I could use for competition, but additionally, I could create in a way that was like somewhat accessible for people online. Think it’s just so fun to do that because it takes like what has traditionally been signature coffee drinks, being like a fancy latte of milk, espresso, and then just a flavored syrup and it kind of just like blows that away and says, what other textures can we put in the coffee, what other flavors that you wouldn’t usually think of being associated with coffee can we put with coffee?

And I think it’s just it’s a fun way to spark interest in coffee in that manner where playing the online game like it’s a lot about getting people’s attention. And so first of all, these drinks are kind of unusual and kind of weird. So that usually will lock people in a little bit.

But additionally, it just gets them thinking about coffee differently in the sense that coffee is a fruit. Coffee expresses itself so many different ways. There’s so many different varieties and flavor profiles and processing, and I want to get people to their but to start that interest, you know. It needs to begin somewhere else. And so creating these really weird and funky drinks that pull from the world of cocktails and mixology I think is a really fun way to get people thinking about coffee differently and maybe even get them using coffee differently in a way that tosses them out of their usual. Like however they brew every single morning, just disrupting that routine a little bit. 

Paul Clarke

Right, right. There are two things in there I want to touch on. And one of those, as you talk about kind of like the weird, funky drinks. And one of the things is, and I like this about the recipes that you have online is that it’s possible to do weird and funky drinks for competitions, but sometimes having judged different competitions and witnessed different competitions, sometimes you see competition drinks that are like, you know, it’s been so hybridized that it’s something that can never actually exist in the wild. 

Morgan Eckroth

Completely. 

Paul Clarke

You know, it’s something …

Morgan Eckroth

Yeah. 

Paul Clarke

… that, you know, within within the environs of a competition. It’s so specialized. It’s really cool. But if you put it on a menu, nobody would have any idea what you’re talking about. We would just it would just never go anywhere. I think a lot of the drinks that you’re presenting are much more accessible from a flavor perspective as well. Yeah, they’re weird. They’re funky. I’ve never thought about putting bananas in my coffee before, but it also sounds just delicious and it looks great as well. 

Morgan Eckroth

It’s been it’s been an interesting trial and error definitely where a lot of the. it’s I mean, my drink creation process is ever evolving. And I look back on the things I created, you know, even a year ago and I’m like, what was I thinking? But it’s been an interesting thing to figure out what types of recipes people actually will go through and make.

There’s a lot of recipes I’ve made and shared online that I feel are like awesome and delicious. And I’m like, people are going to love this. But the actual return of me receiving feedback and seeing how many people actually make them is so few versus, you know, there will be certain like formats of drinks that I’ll post online that I don’t expect anyone to do. And those end up being the ones people make the most. And so it’s fascinating to see what people see online and are actually willing to go through the effort to replicate at home. 

Paul Clarke

And another thing, you know, here at Imbibe, the questions we’re asking and the questions we’re getting from our readers a lot of the time involved cocktails in some ways. You know, I have a bottle of Jamaican rum or I have a bottle of Irish whiskey. What do I do with it? With a lot of your work, you’re taking a similar kind of question, except that foundational ingredient, that central piece of the puzzle is coffee. And we like to talk about coffee being full of different kinds of flavors of chocolate and berries and orange marmalade and so on. Are the recipes and techniques you’re sharing kind of building on those flavor foundations already present in the coffee and how are you taking those into account as you’re putting these together? 

Morgan Eckroth

Coffee’s tricky. I always get very, very, like, you know, envious of kind of the spirit world in the sense of you can create a recipe and suggest them to, by a certain spirit or brand, and they can replicate that drink exactly by having the exact same ingredients all the way across, even down to the spirits. Whereas coffee is really tricky because, mean, it acts more like produce than it does anything else.

And so when building recipes, it’s kind of impossible to, say, buy this coffee from this roaster, like make sure it’s like from this harvest season, from this producer. Like it just gets so tricky. And so more often than not, I try to think in more general flavor profiles. So I have a couple different like buckets often pull from you have your like more traditional coffee, which I consider to be a medium roast, like probably something washed. Maybe it’s a blend, but it’s very chocolate forward, it’s rich and it’s syrupy, and it’s just what you think of when you think of, like, brown coffee.

Then another one that I often really like to pull from is more of that really fruity, lighter profile, which is what we usually think of as more modern specialty. So that often includes like naturally processed coffees, anaerobic coffees, and I usually don’t get more specific than that. But in my recipes I will always try to indicate which profile I am leaning towards because I’ve had I’ve had numerous drinks, especially some of the more tropical ones that are using a lot of citrus.

And you make those drinks with that really rich syrup, chocolaty coffee, and it’s just like it’s so disjointed and there’s just it’s weird and strange. That doesn’t taste good. But you replicate that with a lighter anaerobic coffee, even if you’re using the exact same milliliters of coffee or espresso, and it tastes just delicious and it makes total sense. And so I’ll usually try to give some indication which way I’m leaning just to help people a little bit. But at the end of the day, it is somewhat relying on kind of a trust that they are thinking about the coffee that they’re adding to this drink as well. 

Paul Clarke

And of course, you know, we have this presence online in the coffee community and with your audience, but you also exist in the real world which you’ve competed and placed in U.S. and World Series barista competitions, including taking the U.S. barista champion title in 2022. Now, it’s been years since I’ve attended one of these competitions myself as a member of the audience and for those who haven’t, these things are really their own kind of little world in a way. For you over the years, how much was preparing for the competitions and thinking in competition mode a way for you to translate some of the things you’d been experimenting with for a group of judges? And why, after all these years did you recently decide to take a little break? 

Morgan Eckroth

Competitions are so fun, but I’ve been competing in the U.S. Barista Championship since the 2019 season, so I started in late 2018. Was my first season and I’ve competed every year that was possible for me to compete since this season. And so outside of my barista work and my online content and the marketing work I do, competition has pretty much always been a part of my professional coffee life.

And it’s a fascinating thing to weave into my everyday life because once you get into that zone of creating a competition routine for for those who aren’t familiar with it, a barista competition is a 15-minute routine where you essentially it’s a TED Talk with drink service. So you’re serving three different courses, one being an espresso course, there’s a milk course and then there’s the signature beverage course, which very much aligns with a lot of what I do online. And these routines have to be so ridiculously comprehensive.

There has to be synergy through everything or component and routine from your coffee to your drinks to the words you’re saying. I think that does show in a lot of what I do online. Like I think the different seasons of my online content have been very reflective of what I’ve been doing in competition and in my routines. This is the first year that I’m not competing, which is a very strange thing to do because all of a sudden you have so much more of your life given back to you.

I’m judging this season, which has been a blast, and I do plan on going back to competing. But for me needed kind of a creative reset. Having done this for like five seasons in a row. Like eventually you find yourself just going through the motions and just like you do the same thing you do every season. And when you don’t get the results you want, it’s kind of just like, All right, well, I’ll just do it again and expect something different.

So for me, I needed to step back and kind of reevaluate my creative process. Additionally, judging is such a fun and interesting way to view the competition from the other side of the table. And so for me, it’s less about even taking a break and more just building a new skill set in judging. Because even though it’s not as much prep work necessarily to become a judge in these competitions as it is to compete in them during those actual competition weekends, as a judge, you are doing just as much work as a competitor is doing. And so it’s a it’s just developing a different muscle, I kind of feel. 

Paul Clarke

And, you know, part of the premise of the Imbibe 75, the thing we always call out is that this is our list of people and places who will change the way we drink in the years ahead. So for you here, you are early 2025. You’re taking a break from competing. You have this very robust online presence and coffee. Where do you plan on going? Where do you see yourself going in the months and years ahead? Is there a particular goal or is that still kind of a work in progress? 

Morgan Eckroth

You know, great, great question. My parents asked me this. 

Paul Clarke

Not to put you on the spot in quite the same way, but kind. 

Morgan Eckroth

No, it’s a good question. I think it’s you know, answer is kind of been ever evolving. I think me, I am looking towards trying to find things to do that feel more high impact. I love making content online. Like video work is so much fun. I have a fantastic audience that I love interacting with, but me I’m a very tactile person. What really drives me in coffee is, is hospitality and being able to, like, create experiences for people. And so, I think probably something in brick and mortar someday is on the horizon.

I get more and more excited about doing something involves actual coffee service someday. Also like for me, I’ve started to really lean into writing in a way that I find really fulfilling. So website and the blog and my newsletter, like that’s, that’s what I’m really fascinated by right now and I’m trying to focus on. So, you know, I think probably down the road some day there will be a coffee cookbook of sorts, don’t know, I leave myself open to kind of where this all takes me, because I couldn’t have imagined doing this as a career, you know, even a couple of years ago. And so I, I leave myself open to whatever the next few years are going to look like naturally. Naturally. 

Paul Clarke

We’re getting close to the finish line now. Any final thoughts you’d like to share about your work or coffee or things in the in the future for you? 

Morgan Eckroth

I get so excited about coffee and so excited about the kind of new wave of interest in coffee I think we saw in in 2020 with the Covid pandemic, like a huge, huge, noticeable boom in home brewing and interest in specialty coffee. That is incredibly exciting. And so there’s just this massive group of people that are so passionate from the consumer side about specialty coffee and any chance there is to kind of broaden their interest or their investment into this industry that has kind of an uncertain future, be it climate change, be it, you know, all the economic things that are occurring right now with tariffs.

We’ve always had coffee. We assume we’re going to always have it. But I think more and more that becomes a little less certain. And so the more buy in there is into making this industry strong and better and paying more for coffee and being willing to understand what it is, I think benefits all of us. So I get excited when I see more and more curiosity towards it. 

Paul Clarke

Morgan, thanks so much for being part of the podcast and for sharing your story with us for the magazine. This has been great. 

Morgan Eckroth

My pleasure. Thanks for having me. 

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Paul Clarke

Head online to MorganDrinksCoffee.com to find out more about Morgan Eckroth and to tap into some of those recipes. And you can also find Morgan on Instagram at @morgandrinkscoffee. We’ve got those links for you in this episode’s notes. And that’s it for this episode. 

Thanks again to our sponsor for this episode, Tito’s Handmade Vodka. Be sure to subscribe to Radio Imbibe on your favorite podcast app to keep up with all our future episodes. We’ve got plenty of articles and recipes for you online at our website imbibemagazine.com. Keep up with us day to day on Instagram, Pinterest, Threads, and Facebook. And if you’re not already subscribed to the print and or digital issues of Imbibe, then here’s your opportunity to come on board. Just follow the link of this episode’s notes and we’ll be happy to help you out. I’m Paul Clarke. This is Radio Imbibe. Catch you next time.