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 2013.12 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.3 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”.
Story
Competition record
| Year | Competition | Result | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2011 | World Barista Championship, Bogotá | 3rd place |
| 2 | 2012 | World Brewers Cup, Vienna | World champion |
| 3 | 2013 | World Barista Championship, Melbourne | 2nd place |
| 4 | — | Australian Barista Championship | Champion, 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”. The Brewers Cup year and host city match the World Brewers Cup champions table on this wiki, which is sourced independently to Wikipedia.4
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.
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. He founded it in January 2015 as a weekly newsletter and blog, and it grew into an online coffee school that also designs espresso and cupping accessories — Sprudge calls the result “a hybrid of educational tools, equipment sales, and digital community.”56 Interview bios describe him as its owner, and the project as his outlet for articles, videos and teaching material about coffee preparation and theory.7
In June 2020 he publicly admitted that in 2018 he had “twice used a racial slur which was offensive to a former employee” — the Barista Hustle staff member Michelle Johnson — after which the equipment maker Fellow Products ended its distribution partnership with the company. He was founder and CEO at the time. The episode is documented in full on the Barista Hustle note.5
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. 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 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,8 which is a self-claim rather than independent confirmation. No official result was reachable:
wcc.coffee/world-coffee-in-good-spiritsreturned HTTP 4049 and Wikipedia has no article under that title. The organisers publish results as year-by-year PDFs;10 that is where to settle it. A coffee blog’s year-by-year history of the championship does list “Matthew Perger, Australia, Rimini” for 2014, which is the first support for the claim that is not Perger himself11 — but a blog is not an official record, and the World Coffee in Good Spirits Championship note flags that same list as unverified in its entirety. Treat the 2014 title as claimed, not verified.
To verify
Barista Hustle’s current ownership and his current role. The January 2015 founding date is now confirmed by two independent sources.56 What is still unconfirmed is the present:
baristahustle.comreturned HTTP 402 to this machine, so the site itself could not be read,12 and nothing consulted says whether Perger still owns or runs the company, or whether there are outside investors or a share structure. Sprudge confirms him as founder and CEO as of June 2020 — no later than that.5
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.
Related
- World Brewers Cup — the title he won in 2012, in Vienna
- World Barista Championship — where he finished 3rd (2011) and 2nd (2013) without ever winning
- Tetsu Kasuya — the other champion better known for what he published than what he brewed
- Emi Fukahori — Brewers Cup champion, 2018
- Barista Hustle — the coffee-education publication he is known for
- St. Ali · Sensory Lab — the Melbourne café and roasting businesses he is tied to
- James Hoffmann — the 2007 barista champion whose site he cited as the model
- World Coffee in Good Spirits Championship — the 2014 title claimed for him, unverified here
- World Coffee Events · Specialty Coffee Association — who runs the championships, then and now
- Cupping · Coffee scoring — how competition drinks are judged
- Best of Panama · Cup of Excellence — the auctions a green buyer sources from
Official links
- Official site — Barista Hustle — the site associated with him; returned HTTP 402 when fetched, so its contents are unverified here
- Official site — MattPerger.com — the personal site launched 20 January 2014, per Sprudge; not fetched here