Glass doors now connect Gray Squirrel Coffee Company’s East Main Street cafe to the Acorn Room, a 1,600-square-foot expansion that opened in Carrboro last week with approximately 30 more seats and a new slow bar. Gray Squirrel Coffee in Carrboro now gives drinkers a second room at 360 E. Main St., Ste. 100, with a clearer view into the roasting area and more space for manual brewing.
The new room gives Gray Squirrel a slower counter for Reserve coffees brewed on Chemex, Hario Switch, Etkin, and AeroPress brewers. The original bar keeps its espresso service moving on a Victoria Arduino Black Eagle with two Mahlkönig grind-by-weight grinders. The first order to make is a Reserve coffee through one of the manual brewers.
Gray Squirrel started in 2015 in a 250-square-foot roastery cafe inside YesterYears Brewery. In 2017, the company moved to its current 2,400-square-foot home on East Main Street. The new adjoining room adds another 1,600 square feet to that footprint, which puts the shop’s growth in plain measurements: from 250 square feet, to 2,400, to a connected cafe and production space with room for guests, roasting, training, and retail coffee.
What Gray Squirrel Coffee’s Carrboro Expansion Adds
The Acorn Room adds approximately 30 seats to Gray Squirrel Coffee Company’s Carrboro cafe. The room connects to the original space through glass doors, moving customers from gray-washed brick into red brick, dark-stained walnut tables and counters, upholstered seating, rounded-edge coffee tables, and green tiered pendant lighting that carries the brand color into the new space.
The first bar still handles the everyday espresso rhythm, the line, the milk drinks, the morning orders. The new room has enough room to slow down a cup. A customer can sit in the Acorn Room for a Chemex extraction. Staff can talk through a Hario Switch brew without blocking the queue. Cuppings and conversations now have a defined place inside the cafe rather than borrowing whatever space is left after service.
Sarah Persing, Gray Squirrel’s Director of Marketing, named the new room in the original announcement as the Acorn Room. The name fits the company’s scale of growth. Gray Squirrel stayed on East Main Street with the cafe and roastery together. It remodeled the neighboring retail space and joined it to the cafe. For regulars, that keeps the same address and adds a second tempo to the visit.
The address stays practical: 360 E. Main St., Ste. 100, Carrboro, North Carolina. The location also appears as Main Street, Suite 100, Carrboro, NC 27510. Either way, the counter sits on East Main Street, and the new room gives the shop a larger front door for the kind of customer who plans a morning around one brew method and one bag of beans.
The Slow Bar Moves Manual Brewing to the Front
The slow bar began highlighting Gray Squirrel’s Reserve coffees this month through Chemex, Hario Switch, Etkin, and AeroPress brewers. Each method asks for a different kind of attention at the counter. Chemex gives staff a larger-format paper-filter brew. Hario Switch lets the brewer work with immersion and drawdown in the same device. AeroPress keeps the cup compact and hands-on. Etkin adds another manual path for the coffees Gray Squirrel wants to slow down.
The shop also sells those brewers, which makes the slow bar part service counter, part equipment lesson. A guest can taste a Reserve coffee through a Hario Switch and leave with the device that made it. That is a useful move for drinkers who already buy whole beans and want to see how the cafe handles the same coffee before brewing it at home.
Gray Squirrel also added a single-origin espresso program centered on a single-group La Marzocco Linea. That small machine choice matters for service flow. The single-group La Marzocco Linea supports single-origin espresso work by origin, grind, dose, and shot behavior.
El Salvador Aida Batlle Selection Santa Ana Blend is $20.00, and House Colombian is $18.00.
Production Capacity and What It Means for Availability
Behind the guest-facing room, Gray Squirrel is changing the roasting floor. Co-Owner and Head Roaster Shaw Sturton will transition from an early-1990s Probat L12 to three refurbished Probat machines: an L12, an L5, and a Probatino. That is the technical center of the expansion. The expansion added seats to the cafe and more roasting range to the roastery.
A three-machine Probat setup gives the roaster more ways to match batch size to coffee. The L12 can handle larger production needs. The L5 can serve smaller runs. The Probatino gives the team another tool for very small-batch work.
The expanded production setup also includes a destoner and new packaging equipment. Those additions point to the less visible labor behind a cafe shelf. Roasted coffee needs to cool, move, be checked, bagged, labeled, and shipped or set out for retail. The new equipment supports the cafe, wholesale customers, retail bags, and online sales.
The expansion will enhance wholesale business and improve training and education for both staff and customers, so we are looking forward to putting our energy into those avenues,” said Sarah Persing, Director of Marketing, to Daily Coffee News1.
The expansion is meant to enhance wholesale business and improve training and education for both staff and customers. Wholesale growth needs roasted coffee ready for accounts. Staff training needs a room where people can cup, brew, compare, and repeat. Customer education needs a counter where a brewer can explain why a Chemex cup tastes different from an AeroPress cup without treating the answer as a lecture.
The retail shelf matters here, too. El Salvador Aida Batlle Selection Santa Ana Blend is listed at $20.00, House Colombian is listed at $18.00, Uganda Rwenzori Natural is listed at $24.75, Sumatra Harimau Tiger is listed at $19.50, and other blends and single origins. The expanded roastery is built to feed more than the morning bar (Every).
The Bakery and Compensation Choices Stay in the Frame
Gray Squirrel added an onsite kitchen to the current cafe in 2018. The onsite kitchen brought baked goods and flavored syrups in-house and put Gray Squirrel in the cafe-bakery-roastery category.
Persing said the bakery is outgrowing its current space and described a future kitchen expansion that would allow more substantial lunch options and artisan breads.
Gray Squirrel maintains a no-tipping policy with employee benefits and annual cost-of-living increases built into compensation. Guests see the absence of a tip prompt. The no-tipping policy is part of how Gray Squirrel pays and retains employees. In a cafe where manual brewing, roasting, baking, and customer education all require trained hands, compensation belongs in the same conversation as grinders and Probats.
The original counter keeps espresso service and line management tight. The Acorn Room gives manual brewing and customer conversation a place to stretch. The roastery expansion gives Sturton more production tools.
Practical Details for the First Acorn Room Visit
Chemex, Hario Switch, Etkin, or AeroPress may be available that day.
The Acorn Room gives Carrboro a place for longer cups, equipment questions, cuppings, and the kind of coffee conversation that needs a table rather than a handoff plane.
The three refurbished Probats will affect the shelf and the wholesale rhythm.