Haunted Hurst Uses Thiolized Yeast to Pull Guava From Early Hops

Black Lung's annual collaboration with the Lindenhurst Park District's haunted trail is back on the tanks this week. Thiolized yeast and early hop additions are doing the tropical work, and the brewery says it lands hazy.

Style: Hazy Pale Ale
Release Date: 2026-09-16
ABV: N/A
Black Lung Brewing (Round Lake Beach, IL)

Haunted Hurst is a pun that only works in one place. The beer is Black Lung Brewing's annual collaboration with the Lindenhurst Park District, brewed for the park district's yearly haunted trail, and the name folds the event straight into the town's.

Brewer Josh and the Black Lung team put this year's batch down this week. The brewery says it is built on thiolized yeast and some early addition hops, and that it comes out hazy with tropical guava and pineapple notes. Black Lung has not published specs for this year's version. Previous releases have gone out as a hazy pale ale.

What the yeast is doing

Thiolized yeast is the technical half of that description, and it is carrying most of the load. Hops and malt both hold aroma compounds in a bound, odorless form, locked to an amino acid and undetectable in the finished beer. A thiolized strain is selected for its ability to cut those compounds loose during fermentation. The free thiols it releases read as guava, passionfruit and grapefruit, which is why the brewery's two named notes are both tropical.

That also explains why early hop additions are worth flagging. Hops thrown in early in the boil normally contribute bitterness rather than aroma, because the volatile oils responsible for smell drive off long before the kettle is finished. The bound thiol precursors survive the boil. Pairing an early charge with a thiolized strain effectively turns a bittering addition into an aroma source, which is close to the reverse of how most hazy beers get their fruit.

The practical difference is where the character comes from. A heavily dry-hopped beer wears its aroma on the surface, and it fades as the beer ages. Thiols released during fermentation are built into the beer instead, which tends to make for a more stable, more integrated version of the same tropical register.

Black Lung says to watch for Haunted Hurst right before Halloween, in time for the haunted trail it was brewed for.

Editor’s Take

There is a particular joy in a beer name that only lands if you live within about fifteen minutes of it. Haunted Hurst asks you to know that there is a place called Lindenhurst, that its park district runs a haunted trail every autumn, and that shaving the front off the town's name leaves you with something that sounds like a Victorian ghost story. Outside that corner of Illinois it is a nonsense phrase. Inside it, it is a complete sentence.

What I like is that the pun is not the whole beer. This is a returning hazy pale ale with a genuinely modern piece of fermentation science running underneath it. Somebody worked out that the tropical fruit could come from the yeast rather than from a late hop charge, and then aimed the finished thing at a walk through the woods in the dark for a municipal Halloween event. Park district collaborations do not usually have this much going on inside them.

Source & Editorial

JollyPint independently prepares release articles using information published by breweries through newsletters, websites, and other official public communications. Brewery-supplied descriptions and tasting notes are reported as provided, while editorial context is added by JollyPint.