Not every beer needs a soundtrack, but Burn My EyePA absolutely comes with one. Black Lung Brewing has built this Double IPA as a tribute to thirty years of Machine Head's landmark album Burn My Eyes, a record that did not so much launch a band as, in the brewery's own words, detonate a movement. Naming a beer after a metal album is easy. Making sure the beer actually earns the reference is considerably harder, and Black Lung seems to have taken that seriously.
The hop bill is built in two acts. It starts with a backbone of Cascade and Chinook, the kind of hops that defined raw, unpolished West Coast beer in the nineties, the same era that produced the album itself. From there it stacks on Citra, Simcoe, Amarillo, and Experimental 158, pushing the aromatics into what the brewery calls overdrive, grapefruit, orange peel, pine, dank resin, and a punch of tropical brightness on top of that old-school foundation. At 7.5% ABV, it is a beer with genuine weight behind it, built, as they put it, to be played loud.
This release also quietly carries some heart behind the hops. The collaboration honors Shaun Glass, whose support helped make the beer happen, and Black Lung has linked the release to a fundraiser for his family. It is a nice reminder that even a beer built around riffs and resin can carry real generosity underneath the bravado.
Burn My EyePA returns to Black Lung's taps this Saturday, brewed and canned at their Round Lake Beach location with taprooms there and in nearby Grayslake, where the brewery has been busy expanding hours, adding lunch service, and rolling out new happy hour menus this summer. For a beer with this much muscle in the glass, it is fitting that it comes from a brewery that seems to be flexing in every direction at once.
Grab it fresh this weekend, ideally with the album that inspired it playing somewhere in the background, and raise a glass to both thirty years of a genre-defining record and the community that Black Lung has built around it.