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Brendan Kirby (left) grew up in-and-around Duff’s, a situation he joking refers to “indentured servitude.” His father, Tim, was an owner and fixture, ensuring that by 1995, a 14-year-old Brendan was found working as a busser and dishwasher; after turning 21, he began logging time behind the bar, working at the legendary Central West End establishment off-and-on until its close.
“I grew up working around my family,” says Kirby, who now mans the 8x10 foot kitchen at The Civil Life Brewing Company. “I came here to work and on the third day, Jake (Hafner) got engaged to my sister Colleen. I’ll enjoy not working for family through fall and then… we’ll be related.”
While Hafner, Civil Life’s amiable “captain” will be his boss, Kirby’s pocket of the business is usually one that he, and only he, occupies. Laughing that “80 square feet sounds a little too large” for his kitchen environment, Kirby’s been able to adapt to the micro-space. It was built out by one of the brew-pub’s founding staffers, Mike Bianco, who moved to Florida during 2013. At the time of his departure, Kirby was bartending at The Fortune Teller, just prior to that venue’s kitchen and bar expansions. He’d also spent the better part of a decade at Mangia Italiano, during David Burmeister’s tenure as general manager.
But it was his years learning from Duff’s’ chef Jimmy Voss that’ve really aided his work at Civil Life, his first primary cooking gig. Over the past 12 weeks, that work’s involved an extra shift on the weekends, as Civil Life’s Soup Sunday promotion has found the brewery rocking on the seventh day. Kirby’s weekly trio of soup offerings routinely selling out during a truncated daily run of noon-6 p.m.
Asked the cycles of a Sunday, Kirby offers that “it’s different every Sunday. I’m always totally prepared to be slammed at the beginning. I’ve run out of soups within the first couple hours.” Even the day of the Super Bowl brought a crowd, though many of those folks were filling growlers.
Typically, he crafts three soups, with at least one (and usually two) vegetarian and vegan options available. This past Sunday, that meant a three-deep lineup featuring vichyssoise, a vegan black bean and an oft-requested broccoli cheddar. That soup, made truly vegetarian and without chicken stock, was one he made for his vegetarian wife Jen Fuller, a longtime co-worker at Mangia. (Editor's note: This Sunday, February 23, the soups will be vegan minestrone, split pea with ham, and baked potato.)
“That’s definitely one that I make to take some home,” Kirby says. “And vichyssoise is one of my favorite soups to make. I remember having that at California Pizza Kitchen when I was 12, and I thought it was the most amazing thing I’d ever had. A lot of places with soup make it with whatever’s left over. As such a small kitchen, we don’t have a lot of leftovers. Maybe if we have a full ham, I can make a split pea with a hambone tossed in, but I usually have to plan things out a lot more. There are always one, or two, vegan soups and we try to make a lot with barley. We also try to work beer into soups as much as possible and a lot of ours work really well for cooking because they’re so heavy with malts; a lot of the hoppier beers don’t work as well.”
Soup Sunday will stick around until the weather breaks and spring settles in. At that time, Kirby offers that “we figure that people won’t want to do soup. We’ll do some barbecue, probably. Or what Jake likes to call ‘a plate of food.’ We price most of our menu at around $5 and we’d like to have things like spaghetti or other pastas. For vegetarians, we’d have Greek salad or falafel. We’ll have to come up with a better name that ‘plate of food day,’ but we will have soups until spring for sure.”
By then, Kirby also hopes to be sourcing more produce from local outlets, even as the Civil Life kitchen already has a strong reputation for doing just that.
“We use Volpi meats and all of our cheeses are local, from places like Heartland Creamery,” he says. “We’ve always used Companion for our bread and they’re right down the street. Now we’re using Red Fox, too; they’re expanding what they’re doing and we use their baguettes for our cheese trays and we’ll use a lot more of them. Both are in the neighborhood and we do go through a lot of bread. At Duff’s, I worked with Jimmy and he introduced me to a lot of farmers in Illinois. He’d been doing that 30 years before it was a marketable thing to say that you worked with local farms. We’ve got a good tomato guy, a peach guy. We’re going to be expanding our canning, preserving and pickling options, because we like to give a lot of little tastes with the menu. Once the produce is available, we’ll use it.”
And plugging the gardening skills of a family member, Kirby adds, “And Jake’s mom? She grows the best tomatoes in town.”
SIDEBAR
And if there’s one enemy of a gentleman’s true enjoyment of soup, it comes from that wooly worm on the upper lip. One of Civil Life’s bartenders, Patrick Hurley (right), has a world-class ‘stache of his own. And it’s under his direction that Civil Life is the only microbrewery to anyone’s knowledge that offers a signature line of mustache wax. It’s one that Hurley personally endorses and uses.
“It is indeed,” he writes to Relish in a short Q/A. “I use various brands, but our wax has the perfect hold on any but the hottest and most humid St. Louis summer days. And it is personally approved for use in convertible motor cars.”
Like many good ideas, the Civil Life Mustache Wax came about through bar conversations.
“Shortly after I started waxing my mustache, I was experimenting with different brands,” Hurley says. “Some are too firm during winter and tend to pull hairs out. I found a product at Maven in Maplewood. The owner, Kate, has a line of men's products. I started using the wax and liked it. Customers at The Civil Life often asked what brand I used, so I would give out cards with Maven's address. Then I contacted Kate and asked if she would do a wax labelled for us. She was happy to do so.
“Mostly Maven does scented candles and soaps and so forth,” he adds. “The men's line, which includes shaving creams and beard oils named for writers (Poe, Hemingway, and Kerouac) is called Blue Devil Grooming. Kate told me the mustache wax became a much bigger seller than she thought it would. I think it started as a novelty. The purpose is to keep one's mustache civil, of course. At a certain length, things get unruly. You can shape it and train it as well, even achieving Dali-esque little facial topiaries, if the wax has enough hold. The main ingredient is generally some type of wax, such as bees wax, though cheaper brands also use petroleum jelly. The Maven/Civil Life mustache wax contains beeswax as well as oils of hemp, jojoba, tea tree, and coconut.”
As word has drifted out about the Civil Life Mustache Wax, Hurley says that, “People are surprised, then happy, that we carry such a product. It sets the right antiquated tone for an old style wooden pub with Imperial pints and a strict policy of cash only.”
Asked if any other personal care or style products might be on Civil Life’s horizon, Hurley deadpans, “Monocles. Just kidding. I bought one, but they are pretty hard to keep screwed in your eye.”
