Kay Cheon of Dune Coffee Roasters in Santa Barbara, California is the 2025 United States Barista Champion. This is his sixth year competing and fourth appearance in the USBC Finals.
Cheon winning top honors at some point was inevitable, and everyone knew it. Or at least everyone not named Kay Cheon. Coming oh-so-close three times prior may have felt more curse than guarantee of future success to the man himself. You could see it on his face in Rancho Cucamonga, California during the winners announcements at last year’s Barista Championship, where he placed fourth behind 2024 champion Frank La. You could see disappointment and fire on the face of the otherwise stoic Kay Cheon. You could tell how much it all meant to him.
Fast forward one year to Finals Sunday in Raleigh, but this time, it’s Cheon’s name that was the last to be called, and you see it on his face again. First with a deep exhale, then a smile, then a hoist of the iconic Reg Barber trophy.
The theme of Cheon’s routine this year was building blocks, and how coffee can combine with other components to create something greater. There is perhaps no more recognizable building block on the planet than Legos, a selection of which served as the visual element throughout this routine. A Lego place mat, a Lego-inspired information card for the judges, even a giant pink Lego as the focal point of his table. Because even a technician like Cheon can have a little whimsy.
His coffees, though, were all business. Cheon competed with two coffees this year. The first was an Ethiopian landrace variety known as Ombligon, which had been yeast-inoculated and thermal shocked by producer Nestor Lasso of Finca El Diviso in Huila, Colombia (this just so happens to be the same coffee Frank La used last year in his winning run). His second coffee was also yeast-inoculated, this time a Green Tip Gesha grown at 1,900MASL by Jamison Savage at Finca Deborah in Volcan, Panama. This coffee underwent an initial natural processing before going through a second washed processing.
Like many other competitors this year, Cheon opted to lead of his routine with the milk course. Older USBC fans might find this surprising; the traditional order at comp is espresso-milk-sig drink, but that’s all in flux in today’s modern competition scene. “I call this blend of milk ‘Super Milk,’” Cheon told the judges. 60% full-cream dairy, 20% cashew milk, and 20% pistachio milk, the blend underwent a roto-vac process whereby the milk is vacuum sealed and then spun at 150RPM to caramelize the sugars, resulting in enhanced sweetness and creaminess. When added to Ombligon espressos pulled at a very short 20g in to 30g out, it created notes of raspberry, malted chocolate, marzipan, and vanilla.
(Another big trend in this year’s milk course was the return of the ristretto shots, to help the coffee’s flavor punch through the additional fat content of the modern competition milk.)
For his second course, Cheon stuck with the Ombligon coffee, this time adding jasmine nectar, cold brew hibiscus tea, and a bergamot, vanilla, and all spice distillation. These elements then received a quick shake-up via an immersion blender before being served together at room temperature for new notes of blood orange and apricot with an orange blossom after-taste.
For his last course—the espressos—Cheon layers El Diviso with Finca Deborah in a 1:1 ratio. And at this point can we just, I don’t know if appreciate is the exact right word, but maybe recognize how completely bananas it is that an experimentally processed Panama Gesha—a coffee that has previously won World Barista Championships—was used in only one drink prep in this year’s winning routine, and and as just half the coffee for it? This is wild, right? That’s just where the caliber of competition right now. Cheon’s layered espressos have notes of cherry, orange, and raspberry, with a medium weight, juicy texture, and a long finish.
It’s been our pleasure to cover Kay Cheon’s work as a barista competitor over the last decade, and so I feel confident in calling this a quintessential Kay Cheon routine. It wasn’t flashy nor was it particularly emotive, and Cheon looked completely in control throughout. Instead we were treated to a refined master class in technical prowess. Cheon was paced and confident, the ease and economy of his movement belying their own difficulty. At the foundation of it all, though, are barista skills of the highest order. You need not look much further than the minor tweaks to flavor calls he made from the Semis to the Finals—a note of cherry that becomes raspberry or orange that presents the next day more specifically as tangerine—to see the sort of level Cheon is operating at. This is why we—and many others in the competitions scene—felt like it was only a matter of time before Kay Chen won a USBC.
And now, he has. Looking ahead to the World Barista Championship, Cheon figures as an early favorite for the field, which will continue to be dialed in between now and October. Cheon’s skill set and style of routine are very much of the sort that plays well at the WBC. Expect him to fill up the score sheet in Milan. We joked over the weekend that Cheon was a coffee robot and the dictionary definition of precision, but it’s this level of consistency and technical prowess that is foundational for a deep run. And now BaristaBot5000 is heading to Milan, Italy in October in hopes of returning the World Barista Championship title to America, where it hasn’t been in over a decade. I for one wouldn’t bet against him.
Resistance is futile. Kay Cheon is inevitable.
Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.
