The Pour: Spencer

The gimlet is one of the simplest tests in cocktail making. Gin, lime, some form of sweetener. No smoke, no bitters, no spec that requires explaining. The drink succeeds on precision or it doesn't succeed at all. A sharp gin that tastes like juniper in a Saab commercial, too-sweet cordial poured from a plastic bottle, lime from something that was squeezed last Tuesday: these are the ways a gimlet can fail, and they fail at most bars in exactly these ways.

The gimlet at Spencer does not fail. It is, by a clear margin, the best in the county, and the ingredients responsible are the ones the bar controls: a housemade cordial that is sweet without being candy, fresh lime, and a gin that expresses itself without bullying the other two components. Drinking it, you understand what the drink is supposed to do. It is bright and clean, with a finish that stays dry long enough to make you want to start over.

The Drink

The gimlet is the right entry point for the Spencer cocktail program, because it demonstrates the philosophy in two sips. The program runs botanical, clean, and restrained -- built to sit alongside natural wine and tasting-menu food rather than compete with either. That means the drinks are calibrated toward precision over intensity. No cocktails here are trying to announce themselves. They are trying to be good.

The housemade cordial is the proof of concept. A standard gimlet sweetener is Rose's lime, which is industrially produced and tastes like it. Spencer makes theirs in-house, which allows control over the sweetness level and the character of the lime contribution. The result is a cordial that amplifies fresh lime rather than substituting for it. That small difference is the drink.

Beyond the gimlet, the menu tends toward classics that reward clean execution: a Negroni stirred long enough and served on one large cube, a gin and tonic that takes the tonic seriously. Nothing on the cocktail menu is trying to surprise you. The program trusts the ingredients and the technique and gets out of the way.

The Room

Spencer is at 113 E Liberty, in a storefront that reads, during the day, as a wine shop. The shelves run floor to ceiling. The wine is organized by producer rather than by varietal, which tells you something about the priorities. The wooden communal tables that fill the dining room at night fold back into the shop during the day, or they exist alongside it depending on the hour you arrive.

Sitting at the counter for drinks means sitting while the kitchen works behind you and the wine shelves frame the room on both sides. The effect is that you are drinking in a library where all the books are natural wine, and someone happens to be cooking in the back. That is not a complaint. It produces a specific kind of atmosphere: quieter than most bars, more considered, with a crowd that is mostly eating or will be shortly.

The counter seats are limited. Maybe eight people can sit there and maintain the experience. More than that and the room starts to feel like a restaurant in which people are also drinking, which it is, but the cocktail experience works best when you have the space to be a destination in yourself rather than a pre-dinner appetizer.

A weeknight at around 7 p.m. is the move. The room has settled into dinner but the counter is still negotiable. Order the gimlet. Look at the wine list. Understand why the two exist in the same room.

The Program

Spencer's cocktail program is third-billed by the restaurant's own identity. Abby Olitzky and Steve Hall built the space as a wine shop, added the tasting menu, and the cocktail program followed.^{1Spencer's founding and operating structure as a wine shop and restaurant run by Abby Olitzky and Steve Hall has been documented in coverage including the USA Today 2026 Restaurants of the Year list and in prior Plate & Press coverage.} In most contexts, that ordering would signal that the cocktails are an afterthought.

At Spencer, the third-billing turns out to be a structural advantage. A cocktail program that is not trying to be the main event does not need to prove itself through complexity. It does not need amaro flights or tableside smoke or drinks with seven ingredients, because no one arrives expecting a full cocktail experience. That freedom produces a program that is doing exactly what it wants to do: making drinks that are clean, botanical, and designed to coexist with some of the better natural wine in Ann Arbor.

The drinks also coexist with food in a way that cocktail programs at dedicated bars rarely bother with. The botanical orientation -- gin forward, citrus-driven, low sweetness -- means the drinks leave room for the palate to keep working through a meal. A Negroni at Spencer tastes different from a Negroni at a bar where the Negroni is the experience, and the difference is that Spencer's version is calibrated to be one moment in a longer evening rather than the main act.

That philosophy requires honesty about what the program is not. Spencer is not building a cocktail list that competes with The Last Word for depth or range. The Last Word has a menu organized by era, bartenders who have real opinions about obscure pre-Prohibition formulas, and a room that exists entirely for the purpose of drinking well. Spencer has a wine shop and a tasting menu and a cocktail counter that runs with clean restraint. Those are different projects. Spencer's is the narrower one, and it executes its narrower project better than most bars execute their broader ones.

Where It Ranks

Four entries in: The Last Word is first, and I do not expect that to change. The speakeasy bar on West Huron is the standard this series is measuring against, and the combination of a deep program, a room built entirely around drinking, and bartenders who can work from any era of American cocktail history is not something Spencer is trying to replicate.

Where Spencer lands depends on what you want from a bar. If you want a dedicated cocktail experience, a room that rewards arriving early and staying late, a bartender who will talk you through five different interpretations of a sour, Spencer is not the destination. Go to The Last Word or 312 Underground or Hunã.

If you want one of the best single drinks in Ann Arbor served in a room that is doing several things at once, all of them well, Spencer is among the better hours you can spend. The gimlet is that good. The setting rewards the drink. The wine list on the shelf behind you is not a distraction from the drinking; it is the context that explains why the drinking is what it is.

Spencer sits second in the series, for now. The counter seats and the narrow program mean it will not challenge The Last Word for the top position. But second behind The Last Word in Washtenaw County is not an embarrassing place to be, and the gimlet alone earns the visit.

Spencer is at 113 E Liberty St, Ann Arbor. Open for dinner Thursday through Sunday; wine shop open Wednesday through Sunday. Reservations recommended for dinner.

This is entry four in The Pour, an ongoing Plate & Press series evaluating Washtenaw County cocktail bars one drink at a time. Read the full tracker: The 8 Best Cocktail Bars in Washtenaw County.