WECO Bottle and Biergarten
It was 2019, before covid was on anyone’s mind, and Phill Blair was stalking a building in West Columbia. He’d already owned The Whig, the busy dive bar, for 15 years, but he was tired of driving so far for the craft beers he liked. The building had been many things—a small music venue, a dog groomer, a garden center. So, when he saw the building go up for sale, he jumped on it and got a long-term lease with hopes to buy it one day.
“I was absolutely stalking it for a couple of years at least,” Blair says. “I wanted to open a retail side for years and years. This area doesn’t have a craft beer store and there’s nowhere to buy wine.” WECO Bottle and Biergarten, named for its neighborhood, had a soft opening on Christmas Eve 2019. Then covid shut everything down three months later. “
We did to-go only,” Blair says. “For many weeks, it was just to-go beers. It was not busy.”
Fortunately, WECO survived covid and now, Blair says he has to add tables all the time to fit the crowds. In fact, the outdoor setting helped when people first began venturing out again.
“When people started to go back out, we were fairly strict about our covid rules and we became instantly popular because of the outdoor space and the fact that we actually enforced the rules. We were building new tables every week and now we can seat a couple hundred, easy,” he says.
Blair has created a retail shop open seven days a week that takes advantage of the spacious layout left by the garden center. Although The Whig, which he still owns, has a full kitchen, that was never the plan for WECO.
“The Whig kitchen is open about 10 hours a day, 365 days a year,” Blair says. “I can’t feasibly have two kitchens on my plate,” he says.
Instead, food is provided by food trucks that pull up to the property. Patrons can bring their food back to the tables to listen to music and, of course, drink beer and wine from WECO. Blair says the post-pandemic flurry has left him less time to develop the retail side of the shop than he’d like, but that’s next.
“We probably will have a wine program like a club or loyalty program,” Blair says. “As far as retail wines, the stuff that I pick, I use the same process as getting beers in. It’s stuff I like or that I know there’s a demand for. Our shop is very small, so I have personal likes reflected on the shelf. I like German beer, so there’s always a German beer on tap. I like a lot of Old-World wines. We offer six to seven wines by the glass every day and, on the weekend, we have lots of bubbles and Mimosas.”
Blair says he hopes WECO attracts other businesses.
“West Columbia definitely needs more stuff. Hopefully other businesses will come over.”
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To check out what's on tap, or the food truck schedule, visit wecobeer.com
