The family and friends of Matt Burdick, a fixture in the Utah brewing community who died last week, said he will be remembered for his “goofy” personality; his wit; his love of beer, music, bowling and the outdoors; and the way he was “always there for everybody,” said his partner, Brianne Cunningham.

“He knew how it felt to feel maybe lonely or misunderstood, and I could see him make it his life’s work to make sure no one else felt alone,” Cunningham said.

When he died on Feb. 27 at age 46, Burdick was the head brewer at Desert Edge Brewery in Salt Lake City’s Trolley Square. In an Instagram post, Desert Edge said that Burdick had been the “heart” of the brewery.

Rich Parrent, who owns Desert Edge, said, “It’s hard to think of it without him.”

Over his career, Burdick had also brewed at RoHa Brewing Project and Bohemian Brewery, as well as in the brewery in the now-closed Rivers Restaurant. He also worked at The Beer Nut, a brewing supply store popular with homebrewers.

Rob Phillips, the former owner of RoHa, said that when Burdick worked there starting in 2018, he became well-known for his “Golden Girls” series of fruited beers fermented with Brettanomyces yeast, and named Blanche, Dorothy, Rose and Sophia.

“It was cute, and fun, and patrons loved the unique flavors that came through,” Phillips said.

But Burdick’s biggest impact on RoHa, Phillips said, was how he would sit at the bar and drink his beers with patrons, to “see how he did” and tell them how he had made the beer.

“That was really, really cool for our community and for our regulars,” Phillips said.

Parrent said Burdick continued that practice at Desert Edge, where he would eat lunch every day at the bar and talk to the staff and guests, “making himself available to talk about his craft, talk about the beer, and really be kind of a steward for the brewery,” Parrent said.

In an Instagram post, RoHa said Burdick had “served as a mentor to young brewers, and continued to help support their growth even after he had left our brewery.”

Burdick’s friend Ashley Scarisbrick, who met him while working at RoHa and described him as a mentor, said he “a jack of all trades, but a master of all of them too. He knew how to do everything.”

Wayne Burdick, Matt Burdick’s brother, said Matt had “caught the bug” for brewing beer while they lived together in Salt Lake City, after Matt left their home state of Colorado in 1998, when he was 19.

Wayne Burdick said their roommates gave him and his brother a beer-making kit from The Beer Nut for Christmas one year.

“The next day, I wake up, and Matt already has the water boiling and everything ready to go,” Wayne Burdick said.

He said his brother’s first beer, an amber ale, “probably wasn’t amazing or anything, but we drank it all.”

Matt Burdick’s friend Rachel Cheney said, “If there is a heaven, he’s up there with Jerry Garcia, John Prine and his cat, Walter. He’s probably fixing someone’s pickup truck, drinking a double IPA. And if there ain’t any beer in heaven, he ain’t there.”

Matt was ‘always joking around’

Matt Burdick was born on May 23, 1979, in Mountain View, California, in the Bay Area, said his brother Wayne Burdick, who is two years older than Matt.

When Matt Burdick was a toddler, their parents moved the family to Cortez, Colorado, where their father worked as a car mechanic.

Regular high school didn’t work for his brother, Wayne Burdick said, so Matt went to the “alternative” high school in Cortez.

“He really found his groove there,” Wayne Burdick said. “He really became long-term friends with his teachers. He [maintained] those friendships to the day he died.”

Not wanting to stay in a small town, Matt Burdick followed his brother to Salt Lake City as a teenager.

At a Christmas party in 1999, Matt Burdick met Terri Mehlhoff, who said he caught her eye because of “the face he made when he laughed really hard.”

They got married in 2001, and stayed together for nine years. Burdick adopted Mehlhoff’s 18-month-old son, and the couple also had a daughter together, Scout Burdick.

Terri Mehlhoff said her daughter was “born wanting to cook,” and Matt Burdick was well-known as a chef, so he and Scout would often be found in the kitchen together.

“He would let her cut stuff up when she was really little,” Mehlhoff said. “And he just let them have some autonomy and some experiences, which was cool.”

Now 22, Scout Burdick said that her dad was “always joking around,” and “always wanted to share the stuff he loved with us.”

Matt Burdick was an avid collector of vinyl records, of all different genres of music, and Scout said that when he wanted to listen to his records, he would turn around the chair that sat in front of the TV so it faced the record shelf.

Then he would get out a tape measure to make sure the chair was “perfectly centered between the speakers,” she said.

“He would put on an important record that he loved, for us,” like the Beastie Boys’ “Paul’s Boutique,” Scout Burdick said. He would then “tell us a story of why he loved it, and then he would play it for us,” and they would dance around the room together.

Scout Burdick now runs the kitchen in an ice cream shop, and she said that every time she brought her dad ice cream, he would say, “’This is really good!’ even though he hated sweets.”

He “always wanted to show us that he was proud of us,” Scout Burdick said.

‘He made me laugh immediately’

Before Matt Burdick started working at RoHa, and Desert Edge a second time, he got a job at the Apple Store in City Creek as a “genius,” or technician, repairing computers and phones.

That’s where he met his co-worker Rachel Cheney in about 2010, and the two of them became friends. Cheney was in sales, and she said that whenever she needed help understanding something, she would go to Burdick first.

“He had a way of explaining things to me in metaphors and in layman terms,” Cheney said. “He was never once condescending.”

Cheney and another friend, Dylan McElhinney, were part of a large, tight-knit friend group that Matt Burdick was a part of, that came out of working at the Apple Store together.

They all lived in “close proximity,” Cheney said, and they often spent time at one another’s houses, and would go on camping trips and four-wheel-drive excursions together.

McElhinney said he and Burdick started talking because they both loved music, and describes him as “my chosen family.”

He said Burdick was a outdoor enthusiast, and was known for the signature scrubs he would wear on camping and river trips that earned him the nickname “The Doctor.”

Burdick was also known for the white Astro van that he had lifted and converted to a four-by-four, and he would take it on trails that he had no business taking it on, said his friend Ashley Scarisbrick.

She said Burdick knew step by step how vinyl records are made, and was “extremely intellectual, extremely well read.”

He ”would say it exactly how it is to your face, even if it was blunt, and you could either take it or you couldn’t," she said, laughing. “Just about everybody in his life just respected that about him.”

In 2020, Matt Burdick met his partner, Brianne Cunningham, at Fisher Brewing.

Cunningham said she’d been stood up by a blind date that night, but she ran into Burdick at a table with mutual friends, “and we connected immediately.”

She said Burdick’s humor was what drew her to him. “He made me laugh immediately, and he was very welcoming to me. And it was clear he was surrounded by friends and was well-respected and well-liked,” she said.

One of her first memories with Burdick is an offroading trip they went on to the White Rim trail in Canyonlands National Park.

At one point, “he just floored it, and I came out of my seat and threw my hands on the dashboard, and he just cackled,” Cunningham said. “He thought it was so funny to see me freak out like that.”

Cunningham had two kids, for whom Burdick became a stepfather. “He was so focused on the kids and what they needed and providing them a safe place, emotionally, physically,” she said. “He was always thinking about things that they would enjoy and showing them how to live life with adventure and fun.”

— Friends of the Burdick family have launched a GoFundMe campaign to help with expenses. As of Friday afternoon, it had raised more than $17,000.