Cocktails, campfire-inspired foods & lots of lager: Meet Odd Colony's new sister biergarten

Ever since Pensacola's Odd Colony Brewing Co. was launched by childhood friends and now co-owners Brett Schweigert and Blake Foster in 2019, the principle has remained the same: everything is done with purpose.

This intentionality is visible in the local artists’ designs on their beer cans and the old animal bones adorning the beer taps in their downtown brewery.

Now, the intention will be visible in the hand-planted trees, wood-carved menu and campfire-inspired smoked mussels in their newest location, The Burrow, slated to open in mid-February in East Hill's old Sacred Heart Hospital.

“I always say we do everything the hard way when it comes to brewing,” Foster said. “Brett will drive a van (that we borrow from Big Jerk) so that once a year we’ll pick up 2,000 pounds of scuppernong grapes from Mississippi and then we'll process them for 12 hours a day for seven to 10 days. You could just buy a bucket of juice from somewhere and the customer maybe wouldn't even know … but we definitely feel like it translates to a better product.”

The Burrow was a much heftier lift than creating a crisp seasonal beer, but everyone on the Odd Colony team knew it would require the same mindset: if it was going to be done, it needed to be done right. While they planned for The Burrow to be completed in a matter of months, it stretched into two years. Now, they are ready to share the story of what they have been meticulously crafting.

Lots and lots of lagers

The Burrow’s inner quarters will provide an intimate experience for dinner and drinks, while the outside will be more laid-back with picnic table style seating and outdoor entertainment.

“Our model is split level service,” Foster said. “So inside is a little bit more elevated experience and someone will be taking your order and bringing your food and drink to you. Then outdoor is a bit more relaxed, biergarten setting.”

Out in the beer garden, patrons will be able to order at the bar and then have their food and drinks run out to their table.

Beer will be offered both in the taproom and in the outdoor biergarten, but with a special focus on lagers, which will make up about 50% of the menu. They will keep about eight beers on-tap inside. Outdoors, they will also have a bar and a special touch of serving all of their farmhouse Belgian style beers in green glass bottles.

“We have a deep interest in European brewing traditions,” Schweigert said. “We've been hooked on this one for a while, is brewing European style lager. So, we'll have a huge lager portfolio here. Because we feel like that's kind of the ultimate experience of sitting out in the beer garden with a half-liter of dark lager.”

They take such pride in them, they even installed speciality LUKR facuets to help enhance the taste of the taste of the beer when it hits the glass.

“Another part of our lager portfolio that we're real proud of is our Czech beers. So, whenever you order one of our Czech lagers, it will get poured on an authentic check LUKR faucet, which kind of creates a denser wet foam,” Schweigert said. “It’s poured uniquely to where you kind of a lot of the more volatile flavor, (and) aroma compounds are maintained in the beverage so you get a more enhanced lager drinking experience."

Inspiration from the seasons

While the whimsical, earth-toned Burrow is a stark difference from the original dark and moody downtown brewery on Palafox Street, the two are intended to be thought of as complements to one another. Schweigert said that stepping into The Burrow should feel like the spring-time version of Odd Colony, when everything is in bloom.

“If you're to go hiking to your favorite spot - it's uniquely different in the winter than with the spring. So, this place (The Burrow) is like the spring. It's lush, green, there's green on the floor, there's animals with fur on them,” Schweigert said. “It’s kind of seeing it as a seasonal texture difference.”

It’s intended to emulate the warmth of a cozy mountain lodge, with antler chandeliers and game heads hung proudly on the walls. While comfortable, the design incorporates classy and timeless touches through fringe-lined lamps and light brown leather back chairs, curated by Foster’s wife, Chelsey, who served as the project coordinator.

The restaurant and brewery are both nature and seasonally inspired, mixed with a dash of mysticism and folklore.

“Beers that were being brewed in the Belgian hillsides, like family breweries using what they had, all the beers being heavily influenced by the terroir of the land. And so Odd Colony, by name, is kind of homage to this romantic kind of fermentation,” Schweigert said.

“The imagery here is a collection of creatures, which is our ‘colony,’ but we get a chance to tell the story here, working with a whole new layer of some new threads to the fabric and integrate food, integrating cocktails, and still kind of making them all magnetically synchronized,” he continued.

The inside should feel like a dwelling space that has been lived in. You’ll see aged and weathered botanical books, record players and flowers pressed into the beer tap handles. The seasonal shift is also reflected in their beers.

“A lot of people kind of laugh at the cumbersome process and the labor intensive things that we do to get a unique flavor in our beer,” Schweigert said. “We've worked with everything from chanterelle mushrooms in the spring, to peach season to Scuppernong season to sumac. We feel like those all represent a certain place in space and time, which is the season and it's cool to have it in a bottle and to be able to crack that open. It kind of evokes that same memory.”

The flavors of the seasons will also be inspiring their restaurant specials, championed by executive chef Amy Potmesil.

An eye-catching house food menu paired with earthy cocktails

Potmesil designed her menu to complement the atmosphere that Schweigert and Foster created, alongside co-owner Beth Schweigert.

She was set on a hickory smoke menu item that could emulate a campfire, since that’s The Burrow’s main logo.

“So that goes on to talk about the smoked mussels - I think that that's going to intrigue people,” Potmesil said. “I wanted to do something unique for us … so it's in a cast iron pot, and it has a lid on it, and I inject it with hickory smoke. It's trapped inside of the lid and when you take it off - you get a waft of that smoke.”

Like the smoked mussel dish, the menu is full of dishes that pair with The Burrow’s theme and invoke curiosity, like the venison and wild boar meatballs that riff off a cocktail meatball, and the Bone Harvest lager boiled peanuts. Her unique menu will be comprised of both appetizers and small plates to munch on, in addition to complete plates for a full dinner, such as salads, sandwiches and entrees.

“We have a beer brined pork chop that's kind of a riff on pork and beans, which is really neat because it just seems like such a campfire meal,” Potmesil said. “Old school classic type things, reinvented and elevated to kind of fit this vibe … always trying to serve the unexpected is kind of the way my mind works.”

To complement her menu creations, The Burrow General Manager Erin Cuneo has developed a set of four signature cocktails to match.

“We went with kind of an earthier take on cocktails. So, one of them has seasonal sugar snap peas in it with some sage. So, I played a lot of it off of Amy's menu,” Cuneo said.

There is a unique twist on them, like The Burrow’s signature old fashioned. The secret ingredient? A boiled down dark Czech lager mixed with a little bit of sugar for consistency.

“It's got a little bit of a sweet smoke flavor to it,” Cuneo said. “That's very unique to us.”

For more updates closer to opening day, follow The Burrow Facebook page.

This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: The Burrow in East Hill building on Odd Colony's success