Specialty Coffee Wiki

Heather Perry

Properties3
descriptionThe only person to win the United States Barista Championship twice in the 2000s, runner-up at the world final, later president of the Specialty Coffee Association — and now chief executive of the family roastery, Klatch Coffee, that put the world's most expensive coffee on a suburban menu board.
tagsperson, barista, competition, roaster, usa, california
aliasesHeather Perry (Klatch)

9 min read

Heather Perry

Heather Perry is an American barista, trainer and coffee executive. She won the United States Barista Championship twice — in 2003 and 2007 — placed second at the World Barista Championship, later served as president of the Specialty Coffee Association, and is today chief executive of Klatch Coffee, the Southern California roastery her parents founded.12

If you have read the Klatch Coffee note, she is the reason that company appears in this wiki twice over: once as the roaster that turned an 803-a-pound** [[Elida Estate]] lot into a **75 cup, and once as a competition household name. Her career is the rare case of someone who won on stage, then ran the business, then ran the trade body that writes the rules for both.3

The two national titles

A barista championship is a fifteen-minute timed performance: the competitor makes twelve drinks — four espressos, four milk drinks, four invented “signature” drinks — for a judging panel, talking the whole time about where the coffee came from and what the judges should taste. Winning your national title is how you get a seat at the world round. The full mechanics are on the World Barista Championship note.

YearTitleWhere
12003United States Barista ChampionSCAA annual conference, Boston
22007United States Barista ChampionSCAA annual conference, 4–7 May, hosted by Krups
32007Second place, World Barista ChampionshipTokyo (final won by James Hoffmann)4

Two independent records agree on the two years. Wikipedia’s champions list names her for 2003 and 2007, and a contemporaneous write-up of the Specialty Coffee Association of America’s 2007 championship names “Heather Perry from Coffee Klatch Roasting of San Dimas, California” as the winner while noting she had already taken the 2003 title.56

Note the company name on the 2007 result — “Coffee Klatch Roasting.” That is the business’s original name, before it was flipped to Klatch Coffee, and it is the same name that appears on the 2009 *Roast* magazine Micro Roaster of the Year award.

Two national titles is genuinely unusual. The USBC winner is decided fresh each year against a rotating national field, and repeat champions across a decade are rare — repeating four years apart, with a world-final runner-up finish in between, is the strongest US competition record of that era documented in this wiki.

To verify

Which world final she came second in. Her own contributor biography says she “placed second at the World Barista Championships” without naming a year. Barista Magazine dates it to 2007.7 Both her US titles sent her to a world round — 2003 in Boston and 2007 in Tokyo — so either is arithmetically possible, and the championship’s official archive publishes only winners, not runners-up, so there is no primary table to settle it against. The 2007 date rests on one trade magazine.

There is also a wording conflict already flagged on the Klatch Coffee note: the company’s own profile describes the coffee she used as taking “World’s Best Espresso” at the 2007 World Barista Championships, which sits awkwardly against an independently reported overall runner-up finish. Whether that was a real side category or marketing shorthand is unresolved.

From the shop floor

She did not arrive at competition from outside the industry. Klatch’s own account says she was introduced to coffee at eleven years old, when her parents founded the company in 1993, and that she started on the retail side — pulling shots in the family’s cafés long before she competed in one.8

Her father Mike Perry is Klatch’s green buyer and roastmaster, and Barista Magazine reports that he took Heather and her sister Holly Perry to coffee-producing countries repeatedly on buying trips when they were children — meaning she saw origin before she saw a competition stage. That is the opposite of the usual barista-champion path, where the trip to the farm is the reward for winning.

To verify

The early-career colour. Several vivid details come from a single source each and are worth treating as anecdote rather than record. Barista Magazine says her USBC career began in 2002 with a routine in which she dressed as a cowgirl and built s’mores-inspired drinks using blow torches, serving them in cowboy-boot glasses. Klatch’s own blog names her first championship-winning signature drink the “Naked Verbena” — a cold espresso layered with clear lemon verbena syrup — and describes her preparing for the Boston championship at twenty years old. None of these is independently corroborated, the age would imply a birth year around 1982–83 that no source states, and Klatch’s blog is the company writing about its own chief executive.

After competing: trainer, association president, chief executive

Three things happened after the titles, and they compound.

Training. She built a second career teaching other people to do what she did. Her bio says she has trained teams in more than a dozen countries, and Klatch sells business consulting and training to people entering the coffee trade as a distinct line of business alongside roasting and retail.9 Both statements originate with her or her company, so read them as a description of what she does, not as an audited count.

The Specialty Coffee Association presidency. She is a past president of the SCA — the global trade body that writes the cupping protocol, sets the scoring standards and runs the World Barista Championship itself. Three separate sources of different provenance say so: her contributor biography, Klatch’s own family page, and a conference speaker bio.10 Going from competing under an organisation’s rules to presiding over the organisation that writes them is an unusual arc, and it is the single fact that makes her more than a competition footnote.

Klatch. She is now chief executive, running a company that sources, roasts, brews and wholesales its own coffee — every step in-house. The Klatch Coffee note records that she is currently listed as chief executive rather than the vice-president title she previously held, but no source consulted dates the promotion.

To verify

The years of her SCA presidency, and the Barista Guild chair. Not one source consulted gives a term, a start year or an end year for her SCA presidency — every mention is the bare phrase “past president” or “former president.” Separately, Klatch’s own family page states she previously served as Chair of the Barista Guild of America — the US baristas’ professional guild, later folded into the SCA. That claim appears only on her own company’s website and nowhere independent, and it too carries no dates. The SCA’s own board archives or meeting minutes would settle both; nothing of the kind was reachable here.

The company she runs

Klatch’s own recognition is not personal to her, but it is the environment she leads, and this wiki records some of it already: a 2009 Roast magazine Micro Roaster of the Year title (confirmed against Roast’s own award archive on the Klatch Coffee note), and the sequence of record Best of Panama purchases from Elida Estate that produced the 75 cup** in 2019 and the roughly **100 cup the year after. Those purchases are led by her father as green buyer, not by her.

To verify

Two claims about the company that do not line up with what this wiki already records. A conference speaker biography states Klatch has seven locations throughout Southern California,11 but Klatch’s own family page — checked directly for the Klatch Coffee note — lists eleven cafés. A speaker bio going stale is the obvious explanation, but the two numbers are on record and disagree. The same page reports Klatch winning Good Food Awards in 2012, 2016, 2017 and 2020; those four years are not corroborated anywhere else consulted, the Good Food Awards note does not record them, and the CoffeeFest page returned HTTP 404 when fetched here, so the years are cited from the research report rather than from a live page.

Why she belongs in this wiki

Most people in these notes are here because of a price, a lot or a farm. Perry is here because of a role, and roles are harder to verify than auction sheets — which is precisely why this note carries as many flags as it does. Her two national titles and her world runner-up finish are documented; the dates attached to her institutional power are not, anywhere.

She is also the human link between two parts of this wiki that otherwise never touch: the competition world — Berg Wu, Matt Perger, Tetsu Kasuya, Emi Fukahori, people known for fifteen minutes on stage — and the record-price world of Best of Panama, Elida Estate and Premiumisation. Very few people appear credibly in both.

Footnotes

  1. Chief Executive — Heather Perry contributor biography ↩

  2. Wikipedia — United States Barista Championship (champions list) ↩

  3. VoyageLA — “Inspiring Conversations with Heather Perry of Klatch Coffee” ↩

  4. Wikipedia — World Barista Championship (champions table) ↩

  5. Coffee Explorer — 2007 U.S. Barista Champion ↩

  6. Coffee Forums — Business Wire press release, “Heather Perry of Coffee Klatch Roasting to Represent USA” ↩

  7. Barista Magazine — December 2019 / January 2020 issue, page 110 ↩

  8. Klatch Coffee — “Why Heather Perry is Klatch Coffee’s Very Best” ↩

  9. Chief Executive — “Leveraging Expertise To Succeed” ↩

  10. Klatch Coffee — “All About Family” company and family page ↩

  11. CoffeeFest — Heather Perry speaker page ↩

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