Glasshole Helles Honors a Friend by Brewing What He Actually Drank

Black Lung brewed this helles with Adam Gilley of Repentance to honor Shaun Glass, the Chicago metal guitarist and mug club member #66 who died in July. He liked light beer, so they made a light beer. A portion of every pint goes to his son.

Style: Helles
Release Date: 2026-10-24
ABV: N/A
Black Lung Brewing (Grayslake, IL)

Black Lung Brewing has brewed a light lager for a friend who liked light beer.

Glasshole Helles honors Shaun Glass, the Chicago metal musician who died on July 1, 2026. The brewery describes him as their pal and as mug club member #66. Over more than four decades he played in Terminal Death, Sindrome, Broken Hope, SOiL, Dirge Within, The Bloodline and, most recently, Repentance, and the brewery notes he shared stages with some of the biggest names in the genre.

The beer was brewed this past week alongside Adam Gilley of Repentance, who was Glass's lead singer and his friend. The name comes from a nickname Dimebag Darrell gave him.

The recipe follows from the man rather than the music. Black Lung says Glass liked light beer, so they brewed one he would have loved: a heaping helping of pilsner malt and mild American-grown malts, hopped with Hallertau Mittelfrueh. The brewery expects a crushable light lager.

That hop choice is the traditional one, and it is worth a word. Hallertau Mittelfrueh is one of the German noble varieties, valued in pale lagers for a soft, floral, faintly herbal aroma and a restrained bitterness that gets out of the malt's way. In a helles - the pale Munich lager built to be drunk by the liter rather than contemplated - it is the standard-issue pairing for a pilsner-malt base. There is not much for a brewer to hide behind in a beer like this, which is part of why breweries keep coming back to it as a test of their own lager work.

A portion of every pint of Glasshole will go to a GoFundMe for Glass's son, Maddux. The brewery says the loss was huge, terrible and unexpected, and that he left behind a young family.

Glasshole Helles arrives October 24 at Black Lung Brewing in Grayslake, Illinois, sharing the date with the brewery's Coal Dust release.

Editor’s Take

There is a version of the memorial beer that gets made far more often than this one: the imperial stout, barrel-aged, twelve percent, black as the inside of a speaker cabinet, because the person being remembered played heavy music and heavy music is supposed to get a heavy beer. It is the obvious move. Black Lung did not make it. They made a helles, because Shaun Glass drank light beer, and the whole point of the exercise was him rather than the genre he worked in.

That is a harder thing to do than it sounds. A pilsner-malt lager with Hallertau Mittelfrueh in it offers a brewer nowhere to hide and no grand gesture to make - it is just the beer you hand someone who is staying a while. Which, for a mug club member with a number on his mug, is presumably what he was doing. Brewing the beer the man would have ordered, rather than the beer that looks correct in a tribute, is the kind of specificity that makes the difference between remembering somebody and merely marking their absence.

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.