Barista Hustle
Barista Hustle is an Australian coffee company that teaches people how coffee works. It started in January 2015 as a weekly newsletter and blog written by Matt Perger, the 2012 World Brewers Cup champion, and grew into an online school selling structured courses, plus a small line of espresso and cupping tools.12
Sprudge, the specialty-coffee trade outlet, describes the result as “a hybrid of educational tools, equipment sales, and digital community.”1 The French green-coffee importer Belco, which distributes its gear in Europe, calls it “a renowned online coffee school and designer of espresso and cupping accessories.”2 Both agree on the founding year of 2015, which is why this note states it plainly.
Why it matters
For most of coffee’s modern history, learning the craft meant standing next to someone who already knew it — an apprenticeship, or an in-person class run by a trade body. The Specialty Coffee Association certifies baristas that way; the Coffee Quality Institute trains Q Graders in physical classrooms with real cupping tables.
Barista Hustle took the opposite bet: put the whole body of knowledge online, written down, in order, and let anyone anywhere read it at 2am. Its Japanese site states the problem it was built against — coffee expertise was “scattered across the internet and individual resources,” which made systematic learning hard — and its answer: deliver “scientifically-backed correct knowledge” to baristas globally.3
That framing matters because it is a claim about authority. A wiki like this one cites Barista Hustle lessons in places — see Selective picking and Bourbon-Typica group — the way it cites World Coffee Research or an SCA protocol. It is worth knowing that Barista Hustle is a private company publishing its own curriculum, not a standards body with member oversight. Its lessons are well-researched and widely trusted; they are not ratified by anyone but itself.
Story
From newsletter to school
Perger arrived at this with an unusual amount of credibility. Before Barista Hustle he had three world finals in three consecutive years, and he was the person most responsible for a strange piece of equipment ending up on espresso bars worldwide: the Mahlkönig EK43, a big flat-burr grinder previously used for filter and bulk retail grinding. Belco credits him with “popularising the use of the EK43 espresso grinder as a barista.”2 The argument he made for it — that evenly-sized grounds extract more flavour before bitterness arrives — is the same argument this wiki’s Coffee grinding and Burr alignment notes make, and it is the intellectual seed of everything Barista Hustle later published.
The 2014 personal site MattPerger.com came first; Barista Hustle followed in January 2015 as a weekly newsletter and blog.12 The paid course platform, certifications and physical products came later.
What it sells
Two things, roughly:
Courses. A modular online curriculum covering espresso theory, brewing, sensory work, green coffee and café business skills, with Barista Hustle-branded certificates on completion. In a 2024 video interview, Perger and Barista Hustle’s Jeremy Challender put the catalogue at roughly 1,200 lessons and about 20 certifications, serving “tens or hundreds of thousands of students” worldwide.4 Those numbers are the company describing itself — see the callout below.
Equipment. Espresso and cupping accessories, sold through importers and distributors rather than only direct.2 Belco carrying the brand in Europe is the evidence that this side of the business is real and traded, not a merch table.
The best-documented single product is the Precision Milk Pitcher, the jug a barista steams milk in and pours latte art from. Sprudge reviewed it in September 2017 at a pre-order price of $49 with free worldwide shipping, shipping from that November.5 The design argument is a good example of how the company thinks: it points out that “most milk pitchers’ handles aren’t aligned with the spout,” and puts the handle exactly 180° from the spout so that the hand and the pouring lip sit on one axis — the barista’s wrist and the stream of milk then move as one thing instead of two. The spout is pitched as “narrow enough for high detail pours but wide enough for the perfect slowsetta,” and the handle is laser-welded flush to the body so milk cannot collect in the seam.5 That is the same instinct as the grind-uniformity argument: find the small mechanical inconsistency nobody was measuring, then remove it.
2020: the scandal
On 5 June 2020, Perger published a public statement admitting that in 2018 he had “twice used a racial slur which was offensive to a former employee.” The employee, Michelle Johnson, had moved to Melbourne in November 2017 to work in marketing, communications and community roles at Barista Hustle, and left in August 2018 after the incidents, having signed a legal agreement that stopped her discussing what happened.1
The commercial consequence was immediate. Fellow Products, the American coffee-equipment maker, ended its distribution partnership with Barista Hustle. Sprudge reported the whole sequence on 10 June 2020 under the headline “Barista Hustle Faces Backlash, Loses Distribution Over Public Scandal.”1 Perger was founder and CEO at the time.1
This wiki records it for the same reason it records a competition result: it is a documented, sourced fact about an organisation whose material the wiki cites. What it does not record is what happened afterwards inside the company — see below.
To verify
Course counts, certification counts and student numbers. The figures of ~1,200 lessons, ~20 certifications and “tens or hundreds of thousands of students” come from a video interview with the company’s own founder and a colleague — a self-report, not an audited or independently checked figure, and the student range spans an order of magnitude.4
baristahustle.comreturned HTTP 402 (Payment Required) to this machine,6 so the live catalogue could not be counted. Treat all three numbers as claims by the company.
To verify
Current ownership, leadership and status. Sprudge confirms Perger as founder and CEO as of June 2020.1 Nothing consulted here says who owns or runs Barista Hustle now, whether there are outside investors or a share structure, whether Fellow Products’ distribution was ever restored, or what the company did internally after 2020. The corporate entity behind it is also undocumented here. Two further attempts to settle this failed on a later pass:
baristahustle.comstill returned HTTP 402 (Payment Required),6 and a search of Sprudge’s own archive returned no Barista Hustle coverage of any kind after June 2020 — the two hits are the 2020 scandal report and the 2017 milk-pitcher review.7 Absence of trade-press coverage is not evidence the company stopped; it only means nothing later has been confirmed here. Do not assume the 2020 picture still holds.
To verify
Belco’s version of Perger’s competition record conflicts with this wiki. Belco says he “placed second multiple times in 2011 and 2013.”2 This wiki’s Matt Perger note, sourced to Sprudge’s compiled finalist ranking, records 3rd place in 2011 and 2nd in 2013 at the World Barista Championship — one silver, not two. Belco is an importer’s brand page, not a results archive; prefer the World Barista Championship and World Brewers Cup tables on this wiki, and treat “second multiple times” as loose marketing copy.
To verify
Barista Hustle Japan’s relationship to the parent company.
baristahustle-japan.compresents itself as Barista Hustle’s Japanese-language operation, describes Perger as the creator, and frames its mission around language barriers holding back the Japan coffee market.3 Whether it is a subsidiary, a licensee or an independent distributor is not stated anywhere consulted, and its account of the timeline (expansion to Japan around 2018) is unconfirmed by any second source.
Related
- Matt Perger — the founder; his competition record, the EK43 argument, and the 2014 site that preceded this one
- Specialty Coffee Association · Coffee Quality Institute — the membership bodies whose in-person certification model Barista Hustle’s online one sits beside
- Q Grader — the best-known formal coffee credential, and a useful contrast to a company-issued certificate
- Barista — the profession the whole curriculum is aimed at
- Coffee grinding · Burr alignment · Extraction yield · Total dissolved solids · Brew ratio — the technical ground its lessons cover
- Cupping · SCA cupping protocol · Coffee flavor wheel — the sensory side, and the accessories it designs for it
- Latte art — the craft its Precision Milk Pitcher was designed around
- Sprudge — the trade outlet that reported both its products and its 2020 scandal
- Australian café culture · St. Ali · Sensory Lab — the Melbourne scene it came out of
- James Hoffmann — the other competitor-turned-educator of the same generation, whose blog Perger named as his model
- Coffee YouTube — the free-video side of the same explaining boom, and how creators there make money
- World Brewers Cup · World Barista Championship — the stages that made the founder’s name
- Third wave coffee — the movement whose appetite for technical explanation Barista Hustle was built to feed
Official links
- Official site — Barista Hustle — the company’s own domain; returned HTTP 402 to this machine, so its contents are unverified here
- Official site — Barista Hustle Japan — the Japanese-language operation