COPENHAGEN, Denmark - Carlsberg ASA has launched a beer so expensive it can only be purchased by someone on a champagne budget.
The Danish brewer's Vintage No. 1 beer is priced at 2,800 kroner - the equivalent of about $400 Canadian - a bottle. Carlsberg boasts that it's "probably the best" as well as the most expensive beer in the world.
Brewmaster Jens Eiken said only 600 of the 370-millilitre bottles will be produced, and most will be sold through three of Copenhagen's most exclusive restaurants.
The first 52 bottles were sold last week.
"We believe that there are people out there who are willing to part with this amount of money just so that they can taste an amazing beer or to keep it on their mantelpiece," he said.
Eiken said part of the secret of the 10.5 per cent alcohol beer is the way it is stored in special Swedish and French oak casks in a dimly lighted crypt 15 metres under the company's old brewery.
The brew's taste hints of prunes, caramel, vanilla, oak and cherry port bitterness, he said, adding that it is best consumed with gourmet blue cheese or on its own with "a very special friend."
Some Copenhagen residents, despite the Danish capital's high standard of living, expressed doubts that any beer would be worth that much.
"Only showoffs will buy this beer," said TV journalist Marie Grundtvig Buss. "There can't be any justification for such a price for a single bottle of beer."
Eiken insisted that even though Vintage No.1 costs up to 400 times as much as a normal beer, its special ingredients make it "400 times tastier."
There is another incentive for those finding the beer's price a bit hard to swallow. Each bottle is labelled with a hand stencilled original lithographic print by Danish artist Frans Kannike, making the empties worth about $100 apiece.
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