Deep Ellum Brewing has resurrected several recipes in the past two months, and two of them — the Rye Pils and the Barrel Aged Cherry Chocolate Double Brown Stout — couldn't be more different. It's the sort of paradox beer writers love, and DFW should thank its lucky stars for such divergent outpourings from the same set of brewing tanks.
The Deep Ellum Barrel Aged Cherry Chocolate Double Brown Stout (known to lovers of brevity as the "DEBACCDBS") is a kitchen-sink expansion on the recipe for the Double Brown Stout. It comes housed in a silkscreen cardboard box printed with a short list of the beer's many ingredients and several smacks of pink lipstick. If you decant the beer into a snifter in the comfort of your own kitchen, expect a pitch-black pour with a dark tan head that dissipates almost immediately, leaving behind the strong aroma of vanilla and bourbon.
Mercifully, the many flavors in its name space themselves out over the course of a sip. The bourbon character charges forth first, plowing over any subtlety in its boozy wake. The cherry character follows this bold opener, tart like real cherries rather than the cloying sweetness of the maraschino poised in a woman's mouth on the beer's box. As for the titular chocolate, it’s relegated to the caboose of the taste train — besides a candy lacing in the DEBACCDBS’ residual finish, the other flavors dominate the glass. There are some unadvertised dimensions to this bottle, too: the taste of toasted almonds, the bold assertion of oak. Overall, DEBACCDBS is a beer for the Feast of Feasts, where its imbibers can do backstrokes through its flavorful bounty after months of subsisting on a penitent's diet.
If the DEBACCDBS is the Robert Rauschenberg in Deep Ellum’s gallery, the Rye Pils is their Donald Judd. Though they’ve revamped the recipe from a few years back, the premise is still simple: a German pilsner with rye in the grain bill. Sure, there’s been a spate of easy drinkers from Deep Ellum recently, but when one of your personal cerveza gurus describes a beer as possibly the best thing Jeremy Hunt & Co. have ever released, you sit up and take note.