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…