Xibalba
Dry River Brewing

Darkly muddled coffee brown with a short khaki head.

This has an overwhelmingly buttery dark toastiness to it that keeps bringing my mind to peanut over and over again. A soft cherry character rounds out the lightly tart body where the crisp carbonation comes to a semi-dry finish.

This beer is too weird, and seems potentially flawed.

 

my first beer from these guys, had not even heard of them before they sent some very interesting looking bottles out to colorado for gabf week. this was excellent, a strong flanders red or oud bruin type, crimson colored, brown shaded, clearish, frothy, and quite mouthwatering on the aroma. i get red wine vinegar, dried cherry and currant, heavy oak, bright lemon acidity, bakers cocoa, and toffee, really compelling and complex, but very sour. the flavor confirms this is extremely sour, almost harsh on the teeth, but there is so much flavor to it i cant set my glass down. it has raspberry and cranberry and red wine fruitiness, a heavy rich oak profile with some vanilla in it, and a layered and mature bacterial profile, more than just lacto, really tangy, dry for how malty it is, and with elements of a traditional brown ale, chocolate and rich grain, really nice. this is a pretty outstanding sour reddish brown ale, sneaky strong and quite nuanced. i was skeptical about the bottle price, but its definitely worth it, really cool artwork on the label, and even better beer. this is flanders-esque but even more dynamic from a yeast standpoint. i loved it, and am now really curious about what else these guys are up to! i hope it keeps coming out this way!

edit: here we are winter 2025, more than eight years after the above review, and i am cracking into a large bottle of this marked batch 2, which might be from the same batch as reviewed above, i dont know, a price tag of 25 bucks is a lot now, must have felt like a ton back then, wow. even if it is a slightly later batch, these guys have been closed for years, a shame, if you cant make spendy beer work in los angeles than i dont know what to tell you. this may have been different things in different batches too. like i see bottles with this art and this name saying sour chocolate stout, but mine says belgian style dark ale, which is more how it drinks. anyway, despite the confusion, its not holding up particularly well, not dated, but its old now for certain. mixed culture, brett, red wine barrel aged, its still appreciably all of that, as sour as it ever was but maybe not any more so, this was already sour, sharp and acetic and almost painful in any volume now, overly bacterial with the brett long ago outcompeted, but cool fruitiness like raisins and figs and some malt somehow still intact in this, dry cocoa, nothing dark enough to rightly be called stout, tons of red wine, port wine, raspberry, and indeed oxidation and vinegar acidity, cardboard, dark bread, red apple, currant, nail polish remover, tobacco, dark chex cereal, still flanders-like but decayed past being real enjoyable. i had real high hopes for this, always felt a sort of vibe of mystery around this bottle, maybe partly due to the exotic art and price, and this brewery, and its a shame it wasnt the bring to the bottle share i hoped it would be, also a shame this might end up being the only beer i ever try from this operation, cant be many around anymore, they have been long shut, years, and i never ever scored another. possibly the end of a short and weird chapter, i will leave original scores alone out of respect for the dead, which is generous, because this bottle, this many years later, was pretty rough. they come and they go i suppose...