• Daria Bishop
• Sam Nelis

If its address didn't say Winooski, Specs could easily fool customers into thinking they'd teleported to Europe, or at least Montréal. A café by day and, eventually, a bar by night — with an attached beverage market for good measure — it's modeled on the genius of café-bars common in those locales: tiny places where neighbors stand and sip espresso in the morning, then spill out onto the street with wine in hand as day turns to evening.

There's an energy to these all-day (and night) spots that's hard to replicate — especially in the in-between times, when they're not strictly one or the other. With former Barr Hill beverage director Sam Nelis calling the shots, Specs has already captured that vitality.

Nelis, 35, grew up in that café-bar culture; the son of international teachers, he's lived in Montréal, Ecuador, Pakistan, Macedonia and Greece. Sitting with a drink for hours didn't appeal to him as an antsy young kid, he said, but the hospitality of those places left its mark.

After six years of running the bar at the Montpelier distillery — which was a finalist in the nationwide Outstanding Bar category of this year's James Beard Awards — Nelis was ready to do his own thing.

Coming from building up "big places" such as Barr Hill and Winooski's Waterworks Food + Drink, where he was the opening bar manager, "I was looking for something more intimate, more of a neighborhood vibe," Nelis said.

Specs has been just that. Nelis moved into the former Rosie's Confections space on West Canal Street at the bottom of the Winooski rotary, a six-minute walk from his house, last fall.

Perhaps surprisingly for one of the state's top cocktail pros, he opened the coffee side of his biz first, in December, since the café was already set up. But that bright, easy, daytime atmosphere gives Specs a warmth and approachability that can be hard to create from scratch in a bar.

"I think most people would rather drink a cocktail in a café than a coffee in a bar, right?" Nelis said.

The attached retail store followed in the spring. It's a beverage nerd's paradise, a sort of high-low drinks bodega, stocked with everything from six-packs of Schlitz to rare fortified wines that are hard to find elsewhere in Vermont.

Specs' final element is that cocktail bar, which Nelis plans to break ground on by the end of the year. For now, he's mixing Clover Clubs, spritzes, 50-50 martinis and white Negronis during Friday night pop-ups in the café.

The multipart business' name refers to the specifications — "specs" in industry speak — that make up the recipe for a drink. To sum up all that Specs is, Nelis shared its specs, using three drinks that represent it best.

A Rosie's by Any Other Name

Rotary Rose: Vivid Coffee Roasters espresso, steamed milk, rose, pistachio

• Daria Bishop
• Rotary Rose

During the day at Specs, the iced drinks are frappéd and frothy, the cappuccinos are old-school and foam-topped, and the syrups are all made from scratch. You can get a classic filter coffee or a fancy concoction that might make you question whether it's an espresso or an espresso martini.

"One of the first things we did was look at all the ingredients going into the coffees and think of them as cocktail ingredients," Nelis said. The staff-driven R&D process looks a lot like creating drinks for a cocktail menu, and while flavored coffees get a bad rap in this era of classic cortados and cold-brews, the Specs approach — which includes garnishes and even bitters, such as in the Sunrise Lover ($6.50), with a skewered candied ginger peel and Peychaud's — has gotten a huge response.

Instead of pumps from a bottle of premade pistachio syrup, the elegant Rotary Rose latte ($6.50) is flavored with a creamy housemade pistachio orgeat, a take on the classic almond-based syrup common in tiki drinks. The slightly sweet espresso drink also has hints of real rose, including a striking pink dusting on top. Pistachio and rose are classically paired flavors, Nelis explained. The combo nods to Rosie's, which had a similar drink on the menu.

"It's playful," Nelis said. "Coffee's less intimidating than alcohol. You don't have to be 21 to drink it. Why not have a treat?"

Like a Trapp

Orval: Belgian Trappist ale produced by Brasserie Abbey d'Orval since 1931. 6.2 percent alcohol, 330 ml.

• Daria Bishop
• Orval beer

For all his experience, Nelis isn't a snob. Specs' market, attached to the café via a blown-out wall behind the espresso bar, stocks 24-ounce Busch Ice cans alongside squash amaro, Cremant d'Alsace sparkling wine, cigarettes and an impressively broad nonalcoholic selection. The former Catland Vintage space — a cobbler shop for 100 years before that — is now a place for Winooski residents to stop and grab a six-pack on their way home, as well as a destination for hard-to-find fortified wines.

"Folks in the beverage industry, we don't just drink the fancy stuff," Nelis said. "By volume, we probably drink way more Miller High Life."

There's some overlap with other bev-focused businesses in town, but he's trying not to step on toes, he said. He stocks what he likes, including Orval ($7).

The dark-amber Trappist ale — the only thing brewed at a monastery in Belgium for almost a century — is untouched by time or marketing trends.

"There are some things we just can't reproduce here," Nelis said, pouring the beer from its bowling pin-shaped bottle into its signature chalice, the aromatic, frothy head as big as the dry foam atop the cappuccino sitting next to it. "I want a Kölsch from Germany, a Pacifico from Mexico, a hazy IPA from Vermont," he added.

Nelis' dad is from Belgium, and his great-grandfather liked to drink Orval, so it's a sentimental pick, too. "It's my heritage," he said.

A Lesson in Classics

Adonis, a stirred cocktail that originated in late-1800s New York City: 1.5 oz. Contratto vermouth rosso, 1.5 oz. dry fino sherry, 2 dashes orange bitters, 1 dash Angostura. Stir, serve in a coupe, garnish with orange twist. 13 percent alcohol, 4 oz.

• Daria Bishop
• Sam Nelis pouring an Adonis cocktail with Contratto

By the end of 2024, Nelis hopes to knock out the café's back wall to make room for his dream cocktail bar. But for now, Specs serves a rotating assortment of cocktails pop-up style in the café on Friday evenings, from 6 to 9 p.m. Part of the six- or seven-drink menu (most $11 or less) typically features ingredients available for tasting next door in the shop, if you're seeking some education. The rest are classics, if a bit obscure.

In that realm, Nelis stirred up an Adonis cocktail ($10), with equal parts Contratto vermouth rosso and dry fino sherry. Usually made with sweet vermouth, it's a lower-alcohol cocktail that still drinks like a martini or a Manhattan.

"It's a wonderful cocktail, but it's really not ordered," Nelis said. "I like drinks with stories, with history."

The Contratto is one of nearly 70 fortified wines on the shelves of the bev mart. Produced by a wine-making family in Piedmont, Italy, since the early 1900s, it combines estate-grown Cortese grapes with 31 herbs, spices, roots and seeds before being fortified with a grape-based spirit. The result has aromas of black cherry cola, nutmeg and oregano, and a bitter quinine finish — a flavor Nelis studied with the Barr Hill team while it developed canned gin and tonics.

Fortified wines are "a beautiful place where cocktail bartenders and sommeliers meet," Nelis said, but they can be intimidating, even to the pros. Thanks to his cocktail background, he's familiar with the process for ordering them in a control state; he's worked with 802 Spirits to bring in more than 30 bottles that have never been available in Vermont. (The bev mart isn't a liquor store and can't sell straight spirits, so its amaros are wine-based, too.)

Nelis has started writing up spec sheets for each bottle in the shop, keeping them in a binder for customers to peruse when they pick up something new. Along with the Adonis, Contratto's sheet shares a few suggestions for how to drink it: chilled, on the rocks, with seltzer or in a spritz.

"My grandparents on my mom's side were from Italy, and that's how they would have sipped it," he said. "I'm trying to show people that fortified wines can [stand] as wines."

As he proved with the velvety-smooth Adonis, they hold their own in a cocktail, too.