As noted above, wine can age well. Most beers don’t. Also as noted above, the marginal utility drops off rather quickly for most of us. Personally, my threshold is around $80/bottle for wine. Past that and it’s mostly wasted on me. Under that, however, there are payoffs.
I once tasted a $400 bottle of cognac. It was with it.
A $400 dollar bottle of beer is an utter waste of money. This isn’t a highly-regarded, aged first-growth Bordeaux (even though those are vastly overpriced as well…damn tranche system)…it’s a beer.
Now, there are plenty of handcrafted beers that are worth every penny when they cost a reasonable amount of money…but $400 isn’t reasonable for a consumable good like beer. it just isn’t.
Although I’d have to argue with the poster that claimed that beers don’t age, they do…just not as well as wine, and even then, as with wine, you are talking about the nth percentile of both actually improving with age.
You truly are a community treasure. 
Conspicuous consumption paid my bills the last 7.5 years and, as I step into the mysterious world of freelancing, I hope it continues to. Maybe Carlsberg’s people, as good Danish socialists, see their role as one in which they draw money from the pockets of junior plutocrats and feed it back into the economy, after a brief stay in their pockets.
Okay, I get the conspicuous consumption bit. And if that’s all the beer has going for it, they mights as well charge $1000 per bottle.
I can’t for the life of me understand how it would taste that good. I am a homebrewer, not very active these days, but I understand the craft process and have made many a fine beer. I have paid $50/liter bottle for Chimay in Tokyo (Jimbo-cho) and other not quite so expensive Belgium beers. I’ve bought craft beer in the US that came in big hand blown glass bottles that probably wasn’t more than $40 bucks. I drink a lot of beer, both cheap lagers and expensive craft beers. I drink the local beer in every country or locale I visit.
Also, myself and most beer drinkers like to drink beer. Most don’t care about the cachet or lack thereof. I’ve been at dinners with a restaurant price of $400 bottle wine, and after a polite sip to check it out, switched back to a good beer for my dinner. Any real beer drinker would laugh nay ridicule the pompus dweeb that wanted to show off by buying a round of $400/beers for the table. Unless it really was beer elevated to a mortal realm. I just don’t thiink it’s possible. And daaaaamn, I don’t want beer with a hint of prune.
Not sure what the alcoholic content is “Carlsberg has produced 600 bottles of the 10.5 percent proof beer, each of 37.5 centiliters (0.8 pint).” Does this mean 10.5% alcohol or 10.5 proof? It’s a little unclear. I would posit that IMHO all high alcohol beers (over say the 8% range) all sacrifice taste.
I would be willing to bet in a blindfolded contest of 5 great beers (pick your personal favorite but I’ll use Anchor Steam as a benchmark), that this $400/bottle would not stand out as a great tasting beer. I wonder if it would even make the top 3. Thoughts?
Frankly, I think it’s just impossible. In the article, it says they spent a lot of money developing it, meaning experimenting till they get the right formula. (You can infer it to be $100k, math omitted.) Fine. So why couldn’t they take that super forumla and mass-produce it for $2 a beer? Of course they can.
See, the whole point of good wine is it’s finite. Some years turn out good, but the producers don’t know that beforehand, can’t just ramp up production. They only have x bottles, and they have to ration those over the following 50 years.
With wine, it’s real economics (whether or not there’s real value). With this, there isn’t even economics. Another thing: with wine, there’s 50 yrs of people trying it and coming to a consensus over how good it is. With this, you just have to take carlsberg’s word.