After you walk into an unfamiliar tap room with a Latino guy behind the bar filling pint glasses and, as it just so happens at the hour of this visit, Latino folks filling seats, it’s a welcome sight seeing a poster on the wall proclaiming, “I Want You, Gringo!”
However, it’s not directed at this particular Dos Desperados Brewery customer, it’s a recreation of Pancho Villa’s recruitment poster for soldiers of fortune to join him in the Mexican Revolution. My welcome at this joint that appears to have spilled out of a spaghetti western set came instead from a Homicidal Maniac. That’s the name of a seasonal American Double/Imperial Stout brewed right there in San Marcos.
The black beer with a beige head, along with its menacing name, put your taste buds on high alert for a sneak assault. But the flavor—an expertly crafted mix of coffee, licorice and roasted chocolate with a hint of caramel—is much more subtle, pleasing and ultimately refreshing than advertised.
Dos Desperados Brewery, 1241 Linda Vista Dr., San Marcos; www.dosdesperadosbrew.com.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.