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Upright Ives is a deeply weird beer. It's not showily weird, like beer made with Pop Tarts. It's genuinely alien: It somehow tastes and feels more like vermouth or natural wine than beer. After nearly two years in a barrel with orchard yeast, the unprocessed wheat and Pilsner-malt mash somehow turned itself into Dolin Blanc.
Like Cantillon Grand Cru, Ives is utterly uncarbonated and best served warm, but it doesn't taste anything like Cantillon Grand Cru—it finishes soft but is sweet to the tongue, surprisingly viscous, wild as an African refuge and aromatic as a flower-filled meadow. At least one of our beer writers has declared it the best beer he's tasted this year.
As for me, quite frankly, I just can't figure the damn thing out. But even at a whopping $14 for 375 milliliters, it's a beer I'll probably taste three more times as its flavor changes—because Ives is a weird fucking beer, and I like vermouth.