What do you think billionaires do
when they’re just kicking back? The answer is most likely they get buzzed on
alcohol as many regular nine-to-fivers do. The only difference is what they drink could end
up costing more than you’ll make in a lifetime, because you’re poor.
7. The most expensive beer Beer. It’s the go-to alcohol for many people
in the world. That’s why it’s arguably the most social of drinks, and luckily it doesn’t
usually cost very much at all. In fact, you can get yourself a beer in the Czech Republic for
about $1.50, which according to ex-pat websites isn’t much more than folks over there pay for
water. Some say beer runs like water in the Czech Republic, so not surprisingly this is the top
country for beer consumption. On average, each person consumes around 190 liters of beer a year.
Yep, no other country comes even close to that. One thing we can say for sure is most of the
people in that country would scoff if you offered them a beer costing 100 bucks. We actually
found quite a lot of beers that go for that price, some of them with names we all know.
Take for instance the well-known label called Samuel Adams. It has a special beer, its
champagne of beers, called Samuel Adams “Utopias”. This is how the founder of the company described
these 200 buck beers, “It’s kind of the Starship Enterprise of beer — it takes beer where no beer
has been before.” You’re not supposed to chug it like some college students would do with their
everyday beers, you’re supposed to sip it. It has a 28 percent volume, so knocking back a bottle
in five seconds would give you quite the hit. That’s expensive, but we found
even more expensive beers. There’s a beer called “Tutankhamun Ale”, which
according to news reports was the creation of an Egyptologist. This guy apparently found
residues of beer inside the Sun Temple of Nefertiti in Egypt and got to work making
a beer based on what those Egyptians made. If you didn’t know, beer drinking goes back
as long as human history has been recorded. In fact, some people say beer was one
reason for many advances in the world. It’s always been important stuff. The English
almost had a revolution when the government wanted to stop the textile workers from getting
free ale during their mega-hard workdays. Beer is the boss and has
been for thousands of years. Anyway, Tutankhamun Ale was going
for five thousand pounds a bottle, which works out at around seven thousand
dollars. But that was for the first bottle. It seems after that you could get one for
a mere $70. Still, since so few were made, those that weren’t snapped up were sold on later.
In the US, some people paid $500 for a bottle. This is how one person reviewed it,
“Very interesting beer, to say the least. It was good! Just different. I would
say it's an experience worth going for!” That’s still not the most expensive beer ever
sold. The record, we think, goes to a beer made by a Scottish brewery called Brew Dog. They made
a beer called “The End of History.” While some bottles went for just $1,000, the most expensive
one ever sold went for $20,000. That’s a lot for your average American. In fact, it would be
like Jeff Bezos paying two billion for a beer. The End of History was a whopping 55 percent
in volume, so it certainly wasn’t the kind of thing you throw down your neck. What was so
special about it? Well, inside the bottle was a taxidermized squirrel or hare. You also helped
the brewery raise funds by buying one. Apparently, it contained flavors of Scottish nettles and
juniper berries. We don’t think the dead animal did much for the taste, and if that’s your thing,
head over to Cambodia, or Thailand, or Laos, and you can get some hooch containing a snake or
scorpion which will set you back hardly anything and allegedly make your John Thomas grow.
Disclaimer: The Infographics Show does not espouse, condone, or recommend drinking
strange brew containing dead animals. 6. Most expensive wine
Oh, glorious wine, the nectar of the Gods, the apple of the eye of Dionysus…the drink that
attracts some of the world’s most pretentious people, folks willing to spend big and
talk big about glorified grape juice. You might have heard people
discussing Chateauneuf-du-Pape wines, which is actually just a region
in the Rhone Valley in France. Wines from here don’t come cheap, and so
they’ve made it into jokes in popular culture. In the movie Anchorman 2, Ron Burgundy hit
his head and said, “I drank half a bottle of ketchup thinking it was Châteauneuf-du-Pape!”
Yep, this is one of the most renowned expensive wines. Still, if you go online, you’ll find
you can pick up a bottle for a mere $28. That’s the cheap stuff. You can
also find bottles for almost $1,500. This is still chump-change for some wine lovers.
We’re not sure if you’ve heard of the story, but a clever dude in the US duped people
out of millions by selling them fake wine. One of the Koch brothers gave that guy $2 million
for wines that weren’t what they seemed. He was paying in the region of 50 to 100 thousand dollars
for regular wines that came in fake bottles. Later, Koch had an auction in which he was
off-loading around 45,000 bottles of his precious wine – the good stuff, not the fakes. Just one
of the bottles was expected to go for $120,000. That was a Rothschild 1945.
Remember, that’s peanuts to a multibillionaire. Put it this way, when Elon
Musk was making stupid money in 2020 and 2021, he was adding $432 million to his net worth every
day. What’s a paltry $120,000 to people like that, or folks with many fewer billions. They
could lose that much down the back of the sofa and they’d never know it was missing.
After hearing that, you won’t be too shocked to hear that in 2010 someone at an auction in Hong
Kong paid $328,000 for a bottle of Chateau Lafite Rothschild. You can actually find these wines
online going for just $70, but this was an 1869, apparently a good year and very rare. According
to reports, most of the bidders were Chinese. At the time, this was the most expensive bottle
of wine ever sold, but it got pipped in 2018. That was the year someone paid $558,000 for
a bottle of 1945 Romanée-Conti. The buyer was an Asian wine collector. Just after he spent a
small fortune on that bottle an American buyer paid $496,000 for the same wine. This amounts
to close to $100,000 for one solitary glass. Imagine knocking it over! That stain would be
worth the same as a standard Porsche 911 Carrera. This is what Bloomberg said about where the
wine was grown, “Of its seven fabled reds and one white, those from the tiny 4.5-acre
Romanée-Conti vineyard are absolutely iconic, the epitome of the highest-quality Burgundy.” Not
long ago someone said they’d poison all the vines on that land if the owner didn’t give them over
one million bucks. They didn’t get away with it. A 2009 version of this “fabled” wine will
now set you back over $3,000 a bottle. Apparently, this is what you get for your
money, “Amazingly complex aromas, long, savory layers of earth and spice flavors, and
a silky texture that transfixes your tongue.” Now let’s shake things up a bit.
5. The most expensive cider Ok, so we’ve just discussed the chosen drink of
the high-society milieu, the people that don’t regularly mix with the sort of folks watching
this video. Now let’s get low down and dirty and discuss a drink that is more connected
with the working people, a drink in the UK that comes in three-liter bottles and is quaffed
by what the press has called the “impoverished”, “anti-social”, “under-age” and as any Brits will
tell you, the “desperate.” Hey, at just over three quid ($4.1) for a three-liter bottle of 8.4
percent hooch the stuff is an absolute bargain. But let’s leave the likes of “White Lightning”
and “Frosty Jack's” alone for now. We don’t want anyone having a panic attack here. Let’s instead
focus on the ciders of the privileged class, where golden apples hang from luxurious trees.
Actually, ciders it seems don’t get that expensive. We went online window shopping and
struggled to find any ciders worthy of the palette of a billionaire. Sure, you could get your hands
on a bottle of “Sea Cider Prohibition” for $25, but that’s hardly a massive step up from the
stuff that boasts “50 percent off” on the label. The French of course make cider sound really
expensive. Imagine telling your buddy you just cracked open your third bottle of Frosty Jacks and
he then tells you with an air of disgust that he’s about to quaff his first bottle of “Eric Bordelet
'Perlant' Jus de Pommes a Sydre.” Snob. He would have paid in the region of $18 for his drink. In
your mind you’re a winner because after a bit of adding up you’ve worked out you’ve effectively,
percent-wise, gotten yourself a real bargain. A bottle of “Cidre Dupont Réserve” will cost you
about $35. A bottle of “Domaine de Kervéguen Cuvée Carpe Diem Prestige”, even though it sounds great,
costs just $25. It seems like that’s about as much as an expensive cider will cost, so we’ll leave it
there and now get into the most expensive kinds of booze you can buy that’s not wine.
4. The most expensive rum Some of you philistines out there would
spoil a good rum by adding Cola to it, but we know a few of you rum aficionados
would never defile a good drink by mixing it with unknown chemicals. You would never consider
doing that with a glass of “Legacy by Angostura”. This is a rum that comes from Trinidad &
Tobago and will set you back around $35,000. Unlike wine, people aren’t buying it
because it’s old. It’s just said to be of really high quality and if you bought
a decanter of it you’d be only one of 20 other people who were rich enough to buy one.
If you wanted to buy some rum right now and not have to go to an auction for it, you could
spend just over $5,000 and pick up a bottle of “Appleton Estate 50 Years Jamaican
Independence Reserve.” Quite a few online stores say “sold out”, but we found some
places that have a couple of bottles in stock. We think the winner for the rum is
the “J. Wray and Nephew 1940s rum”, or at least it’s the winner in terms of what you
can find online and buy now. This stuff in the past has gone for $50,000. The 25-year old of its
kind you can see for sale now at around $12,000. Some of the most expensive bottles ever sold were
found in a stately house in the city of Leeds in northern England. That rum was bottled with a
few others back in 1780. In 2014, they were all sold at auction for around $11,000 each.
The guy who owned the house said this, “I had always known the bottles were down there
but I wouldn’t have given them another look.” This man was already related to an Earl
and part of England’s rich, so he gave the proceeds of the auction to a charity.
Ok, on to something even more expensive 3. The world’s most expensive cognac
Cognac is also one of those drinks you associate with the wealthy. It’s the kind of
thing you drink in the drawing-room after dinner while smoking cigars and talking with bearded
gentlemen about how you plan to do an arms deal with a dictator on the other side of the world.
We went to a website and as soon as it opened a man in a serious voice said, “Dare to
taste, Remy Martin Black Pearl Louis XIII Cognac” and then he waffles on about becoming a
“master of time” or something like that. They’ve obviously hired one of those high-paid
copywriters because instead of talking about what booze does – gets you sloppy – the
website mentions “sensibility and temporality.” That kind of talk doesn’t come cheap. A bottle of
this stuff right now will cost you around $40,000. There are plenty of them, too. Right now you
can buy the magnum version for almost $130,000, which makes this cognac an expensive tipple
indeed. That’s why it’s the drink of choice for British arms dealers…well, maybe it is.
It’s not the most expensive though. We found a bottle of Gautier Cognac that was made
in 1762. At an auction, it went for $144,525. Now for something Russian
arms dealers like to drink. 2. The most expensive vodka
Ok, so there’s something called “Billionaire Vodka”. That’s because it costs $3.7 million a
bottle. That’s sure to elicit the “starving kids around the world” cliché. Who could seriously
live with themselves for buying a bottle? The thing is, the reason it’s so expensive is
that it’s not just the “purest and softest vodka”, but because when it was made the water flowed
over diamonds. Yep, that’s true. But the main reason it costs so much is that there are
3,000 diamonds studded onto the bottle itself. There’s another vodka called “Royal Dragon
Vodka” that costs US$5.5 million, but again, your paying for diamond-studded packaging.
That’s kind of cheating. What about regular vodka? How much does that go for?
There’s Absolut’s “Crystal Pinstripe Black Bottle”. It doesn’t come with gold or
diamonds or certain kinds of gems, but it is a crystal bottle. It costs just over $1,000.
There’s the “Stoli Elit: Himalayan Edition” vodka which has nice packaging but nothing too over
the top. One of the reasons it’s so expensive is the fact it was made with Himalayan water. For
$3,000 you apparently get a really smooth taste. It’s the kind of stuff rappers
drink before getting into a fight. It looks as though that’s the thing with
expensive vodkas; it’s mostly about the bling. If they’re not covered in gems or made on
the moon they generally don’t cost too much. You can still buy some brands for $100 to $300,
though, that don’t come in a special bottle. It’s the same with tequila. The expensive stuff has a
luxury package, so we’re not going there again. Let’s instead focus on arguably the most famous
spirit of them all, a drink that doesn’t require bling to make it ridiculously expensive.
The most expensive whisky The scots have been making and drinking
whisky for quite some time, so you won’t be surprised to hear that collectors pay
large amounts for some of the older stuff. They don’t have to be too old to cost a
lot, though. Take for instance the “Octomore 10-year-old 2nd edition”. It costs $235. Then
you’ve got the “2004 George T. Stagg Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey” costing around $550.
Someone commented on the latter, saying it has a “quality that defies belief”. You’re not
paying for age here, or diamonds, just quality. Then you’ve got Macallan’s “1824 series”,
which despite the name doesn’t have an age on the bottle. Those can go for around $900.
Like wine drinkers, some whisky drinkers take their hobby seriously. This is how one
person described smelling that 1824 stuff: “Buttery and creamy, with grapefruit-tinged
citrus notes providing background sharpness. On top of that comes layers of more
traditional sherry notes, with milk chocolate, sugared raisins, and spiced apple.”
Still, the most expensive stuff has been aged a fair while. A bottle of “Bowmore
1957” has an average price of $710,220. Right now online you can buy a “Bowmore 'Black
Bowmore' Finest Single Malt Scotch Whisky” for just over $40,000. A “Springbank 1919”
is just $78,000 a bottle, which is a similar price to many regular vintage whiskies.
As for the big guns, a “Macallan 1926” from a certain cask went for over $2.6 million in
2019. It was called the “Holy Grail” of whiskies. Not many people have tasted it. One guy that did
taste it said, “It's a great whisky - but I've had better.” A bottle from the same batch had earlier
sold for $1.2 million. From what we can see, if we’re not talking about fancy bottles, these
are the most expensive drinks in the world. Now you need to watch, “Most Expensive
Things in the World.” Or, have a look at…
