Brute Force Attack Strategies
No, you can divide and distribute, but if you do anything else (such as filtering for candidates) then it would not officially be a brute force attack anymore. You will have to iterate over the full key space one way or another.

With DES I guess it is acceptable to forget about parity while iterating over the key space, only effective key bits have to be traversed.

Finally, there may be specific methods required to filter out possible candidates if it isn't a known plaintext attack (which is however assumed in the question).