The Grind: Espy Cafe

There is a coffee shop in Ann Arbor where you drink espresso out of a handmade ceramic mug, pulled on a Decent DE1XXL that costs more than most used cars, in a room furnished with hand-milled Michigan hard maple and red oak, on trestle tables built by a carpenter named Jim Pudar using mortise-and-tenon joinery. The chairs are from a thrift store.

That combination (obsessive investment in some things, deliberate plainness in others) is Espy Cafe, and it tells you most of what you need to know about how Peter Littlejohn and Sam Schaefer think about the experience they're building at 404 West Huron.

The Drink

The order here is the house espresso, pulled as a double and drunk straight before you decide whether to let milk into it.

Espy's espresso program is calibrated for the middle ground that, as the profile noted before opening, requires the most skill: enough body to hold structure in a latte, enough clarity to reward drinking straight. The coffee is sourced through Semilla and Sundog Trading, two specialty importers that work on multi-year buying commitments with smallholder projects. Espy adds new origins only when volume justifies another long-term relationship. The result is a small, rotating selection of coffees that the roaster knows deeply rather than a wide menu of beans they've bought once.^{1Espy's sourcing model (multi-year commitments through Semilla and Sundog Trading, with new origins added only as volume permits) is per Daily Coffee News' March 2026 profile of the cafe.}

What the espresso tastes like depends on which origin is in the hopper. The program leans clean and bright rather than roasty and heavy. Intentionally so. The shots I've had have run between citrus-forward and slightly nutty, with a body that's lighter than RoosRoast's Lobster Butter Love by design. This is not a coffee trying to be that coffee. It is doing something different with the raw material and making a coherent argument for its choices.

If you want to add milk, you have two options: A2 dairy or Ope Milk, a house-made oat-based drink with sunflower butter that Espy developed as a non-dairy substitute designed to match dairy's nutritional profile rather than just mimic its texture. The hazelnut orgeat is house-made and available as a modifier. None of this is decoration. Espy's milk options are the work of people who have thought about the whole cup, not just the espresso.

The Mahlkönig EK43 handles single-dose grinding. Two Decent DE1XXL machines handle extraction. These are not the equipment choices of a shop that is fuzzy about what it's doing.

The Room

West Huron between downtown and the Old West Side was a dead stretch. Nothing pulled you off the sidewalk. Espy moved into a formerly windowless light-industrial building on that block and had to build a room from scratch.

What they built is specific. Long communal tables fill most of the floor, hand-milled from Michigan hard maple and red oak, two inches thick on trestle bases. The joinery is the kind that takes longer than most cafe build-outs allow. Over 300 ceramic mugs and pieces by Anna Schwartz of Ypsi Clay House cover the counter and the shelves: not as visual merchandising, but as the actual vessels. You drink your espresso out of one of them.

Against all of that craft, the chairs are thrift-store school chairs. It is a deliberate choice, and it works: the room signals that the investment went into the things that matter for coffee and community and not into the things that photograph well. The overall effect is warm and a little austere, which matches the coffeehouse tradition better than exposed-brick cosplay.

The space is not large. There is seating, but it fills on weekend mornings. The communal table format encourages the kind of lingering that a four-top discourages. This is not a quick-stop room. It is built for the hour-long coffee, which is either exactly what you want or a reason to go elsewhere depending on the morning.

The Program

Espy's roasting does not happen at the cafe. The beans are roasted at Anthology Coffee in Detroit on an IMF RM-15 machine, then brought to West Huron.^{2Roasting at Anthology Coffee in Detroit on an IMF RM-15 machine is per the Daily Coffee News profile of Espy Cafe, published March 18, 2026.} The "watch the roasting happen" version of the story, which circulated before opening, was the intention; the reality of a Detroit-based roasting relationship is different, though not less serious. The sourcing model is the same either way: multi-year commitments, Semilla and Sundog as importers, a small rotating selection rather than a sprawling menu.

What the program is trying to do is legible in every decision. No tips. Equal base wages for everyone, including the owners. Employees earn ownership shares based on hours worked. Democratic decision-making about the menu and hours and staffing. The name comes from "s" plus "p" (Sam and Peter) and from the word's definition: to catch a glimpse. The philosophy is that a coffee shop can be a place where people see something different in how a small business can operate.

This matters for the coffee because the same rigor applies there. You do not build a no-tip equal-wage ownership structure and then buy commodity espresso beans. The sourcing, the equipment, the ceramics, the furniture: the care is consistent across everything Espy has decided to care about.

What the program is not doing is chasing the specialty-coffee vocabulary of processing method and lot number as brand signals. The menu does not list altitudes and fermentation percentages. Espy's identity is not built on that register. It is built on doing the whole thing thoughtfully, from the ownership model to the grinder choice to the chairs.

Where It Ranks

Entry 1 set the benchmark with RoosRoast: twenty years of roasting refinement, the Lobster Butter Love's crossover loyalty, a room with real character at the Rosewood facility. The question for Espy is whether seven weeks of operation can challenge that.

Not yet. The honest answer is not yet.

The espresso program is good and getting better. The room is among the most considered in Ann Arbor coffee. The sourcing and ownership model give the whole operation a coherence that most cafes never achieve. These are real things, and they will count more as the program matures and the roasting relationship with Anthology deepens. At this stage, Espy does not have what RoosRoast has: the accumulated knowledge of a roasting program that has been running the same beans long enough to know exactly what they do. RoosRoast knows its Lobster Butter Love the way a baker knows a decades-old sourdough starter. Espy is still building that knowledge.

What Espy has that RoosRoast does not is a room built for the act of drinking coffee, and a light-roast orientation that will reward people who find RoosRoast's medium-dark profiles too heavy. Those are real competitive advantages. They are not yet enough to unseat the benchmark. Ask again in a year, when the sourcing relationships have more history and the espresso program has the repetitions it needs to fully deliver on the equipment.

The rank: Espy at 2, RoosRoast at 1. The gap is smaller than the distance in years suggests.

Espy Cafe is at 404 W Huron St, Ann Arbor. Open Thursday through Monday, 8 a.m.-3 p.m. Closed Tuesday and Wednesday. No tips. Employee-owned.

This is Entry 2 of The Grind: Best Coffee in Ann Arbor, an ongoing series.