Coffee Sketcher

Matt Perger

Properties3
descriptionThe Australian barista who won the 2012 World Brewers Cup and finished 3rd and 2nd at the World Barista Championship — then became better known for writing about coffee than for competing in it.
tagsperson, australia, barista, brewers-cup, brewing, education
aliasesMatthew Perger, Matt Perger Barista Hustle

8 min read

Matt Perger

Matt Perger is an Australian barista, roaster and coffee writer based in Melbourne. He is the 2012 World Brewers Cup champion, a two-time Australian Barista Champion, and a two-time World Barista Championship finalist — 3rd in 2011 and 2nd in 2013 (Sprudge — Barista Champion Matt Perger To Launch A Coffee Website, 13 January 2014, accessed 2026-07-23; Sprudge — Every World Barista Championship Finalist, Ranked, accessed 2026-07-23). His 2012 Brewers Cup title is already recorded in this wiki’s own champions table — Vienna, for Australia.

What makes him unusual is what he did after the trophies. Like Tetsu Kasuya, he is remembered less for a cup he served than for something he gave away: long, technical, plainly-written explanations of how coffee actually works, published free on the internet. He put the goal in one sentence in 2014: “I want a barista/roaster/anyone to read an article, fully understand the content, and use that information to make better coffee” (Sprudge, 13 January 2014).

Story

Competition record

YearCompetitionResult
2011World Barista Championship, Bogotá3rd place
2012World Brewers Cup, ViennaWorld champion
2013World Barista Championship, Melbourne2nd place
—Australian Barista ChampionshipChampion, twice (years not documented here)

The placings are corroborated twice over: Sprudge’s compiled finalist ranking lists him at 3rd in 2011 and 2nd in 2013, and a separate Sprudge news piece from January 2014 describes him as a “two-time Australian Barista Champion, World Barista Championship silver medalist and World Brewers Cup champion” (both accessed 2026-07-23). The Brewers Cup year and host city match the World Brewers Cup champions table on this wiki, which is sourced independently to Wikipedia.

Note what that record is: three world finals in three consecutive years, in two different disciplines — espresso on the barista stage, hand-poured filter on the Brewers Cup stage. Very few people have done that. He never won the barista title itself; 2011 went to Alejandro Mendez of El Salvador and 2013 to Pete Licata of the United States.

Writing, and the EK43

On 20 January 2014 (North America; 21 January in Australia) he launched MattPerger.com, a personal coffee-technical site. The opening run of articles was about a single piece of equipment — the Mahlkönig EK43 grinder — and ran to roughly 4,500 words, written to be readable by professionals and home enthusiasts at the same time (Sprudge, 13 January 2014, accessed 2026-07-23).

The EK43 is worth explaining, because the fuss is not obvious. It is a large flat-burr grinder that the industry had used mainly for filter coffee and bulk retail grinding — not for espresso, which traditionally used conical or smaller flat burrs. Grinding espresso on an EK43 was, at the time, an odd thing to do. Perger’s argument was about grind uniformity: the more evenly sized the coffee particles, the more evenly water extracts them, and the more of the coffee’s flavour you can pull out before the bitter compounds arrive. Cafés worldwide subsequently put EK43s on their espresso bars.

He told Sprudge he wanted the site to be “an asset for the industry” in the way Jim Hoffmann’s jimseven.com was — James Hoffmann, the 2007 World Barista Champion, being the other competitor-turned-explainer of that generation.

Barista Hustle

Perger is most commonly introduced today as the person behind Barista Hustle, an online coffee-education publication and course platform. Interview bios describe him as its owner, and the project as his outlet for articles, videos and teaching material about coffee preparation and theory. This wiki could not verify the founding date, ownership structure or current status of Barista Hustle from a primary source — see the callout below.

St. Ali and Sensory Lab

Both his Melbourne affiliations are real and documented: Sprudge describes him as closely affiliated with the St. Ali Family, the Melbourne-and-Sydney café group that operates the St. Ali and Sensory Lab venues (13 January 2014, accessed 2026-07-23). St. Ali is one of the businesses most responsible for Melbourne’s reputation as a specialty-coffee city; Sensory Lab is its roasting-and-brew-bar offshoot.

His roles across these years are usually listed together as barista, roaster, green coffee buyer and researcher — “green coffee buyer” meaning the person who tastes and buys unroasted coffee from producers, the job that connects a café to auctions like Best of Panama and Cup of Excellence.

To verify

“Partner” versus “affiliated with.” Interview bios behind the research report describe Perger as a partner at both St. Ali and Sensory Lab — an ownership stake, not employment. The only source fetched here (Sprudge) says only that he is “closely affiliated with the St. Ali Family.” No business registry, company disclosure or official St. Ali page was checked, and no share percentage or start/end dates for any partnership are documented anywhere consulted. Do not state an ownership stake as fact.

To verify

The 2014 World Coffee in Good Spirits title. The research report states he won the World Coffee in Good Spirits Championship in 2014 — the championship for coffee-and-alcohol drinks, one of the seven World Coffee Championships. Both cited sources are YouTube interviews, one of them Perger stating it about himself, which is a self-claim rather than independent confirmation. No official result was reachable: wcc.coffee/world-coffee-in-good-spirits returned HTTP 404 on 2026-07-23 and Wikipedia has no article under that title. The organisers publish results as year-by-year PDFs (World Coffee Championships — Past rankings); that is where to settle it. Treat the 2014 title as claimed, not verified.

To verify

Barista Hustle’s founding, ownership and current status. baristahustle.com returned HTTP 402 to this machine on 2026-07-23, so the site itself could not be read. Everything above about Barista Hustle rests on interview bios in the research report. No founding year is stated in any source consulted, and nothing confirms whether Perger still owns or runs it today.

To verify

His competition scores. Sprudge’s compiled list gives 659 points in 2011 and 619 in 2013. This wiki already flags that whole score series as unofficial and internally broken — see the callout in World Barista Championship > Scores, and why you can’t compare them. Scores are only comparable within a single year’s final anyway, because the scoresheet has been rebuilt several times. Do not quote these as official results.

To verify

What he actually competed with. No source consulted names the coffee, farm, variety, processing method, roaster or grinder behind any of his three world finals — including whether he used an EK43 on stage, which is the thing he is most associated with. Competitors’ technical sheets are not publicly browsable. Equally undocumented: his birth date or full legal name, the years of his two Australian titles, and any specific green-coffee purchases (Best of Panama lots, Cup of Excellence lots, prices, cupping scores) made in his role as a buyer. Any such detail attached to his name would be invented.

Sources

  1. World Coffee Championships — Past rankings (official) — the authoritative record for all placings above; accessed 2026-07-23
  2. Sprudge — Barista Champion Matt Perger To Launch A Coffee Website — published 13 January 2014, accessed 2026-07-23
  3. Sprudge — Every World Barista Championship Finalist, Ranked — accessed 2026-07-23
  4. Wikipedia — World Brewers Cup — source of the 2012 champions-table row cited via World Brewers Cup, accessed 2026-07-23
  5. Barista Hustle — attempted 2026-07-23, returned HTTP 402
  6. World Coffee Championships — Coffee in Good Spirits — attempted 2026-07-23, returned HTTP 404
  7. Episode 89 — Barista Hustle with Matt Perger (video) — cited in the research report, not independently fetched
  8. MIF Podcast 2 — Matt Perger (video) — cited in the research report, not independently fetched; contains his own claim to the 2014 Coffee in Good Spirits title
  9. Matt Perger at Out of the Box 2015 (video) — cited in the research report, not independently fetched

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