This week Austin Lunn, mountain-man mastermind of black-metal project Panopticon, completes a trilogy of albums he began three years ago, releasing Autumn Eternal via Bindrune Recordings. The 2012 masterpiece Kentucky started the series, fusing black metal and bluegrass in an arresting homage to the Appalachians—as well as to the courage and suffering of the ordinary people who fought the coal companies despoiling those mountains. Roads to the North, a more orthodox black-metal album, followed in 2014, and Autumn Eternal—which features John Becker of Chicago goth-pop group Vaskula playing violin on two tracks—comes out tomorrow.
Louis Glunz picked up Hammerheart’s kegs for Chicago distribution in June, and since then I’ve seen their beers at the Local Option, the Hopleaf, Jerry’s in Andersonville, the Bad Apple, the Map Room, and Kuma’s. (Bear in mind that I live in Edgewater, so north-side bars are overrepresented in my sample.) So far I’ve tried Flaming Longship Scottish ale, Dublin Raid peat-smoked Irish red, Hokan’s brown ale, Thor’s smoked chile porter, Fautzrauch smoked pale ale, and Imperial Longship barrel-aged smoked Scottish ale, which is probably my favorite—it’s impossibly rich without tipping over into cloying sweetness. Wait, I almost forgot the most explicitly metal beer in the bunch: Serpensblod, a peppery malt-forward red rye ale named after the most recent Agalloch album, last year’s The Serpent & the Sphere.
