Ontario drinkers apparently have a taste for pricey beer — or at least a sleek bottle.

Despite a hefty $114.95 price tag, 400 bottles of Samuel Adams Utopias sold out today, just two and a half hours after being put up for sale by the LCBO. Sales had opened via the LCBO’s telephone ordering system at 8:30 a.m. Friday; by 11 a.m., they’d all been snapped up.

The strong, uncarbonated brew, with an alcohol content of 28 per cent, is a blend of several types of beer which have been aging in barrels which previously held different spirits and wines, including bourbon, port and rum.

The oldest beer that is part of the blend is 21 years old, and was part of Koch’s first batch of Samuel Adams Triple Bock, arguably the world’s first “extreme” beer when it was launched in the early 1990s, at a relatively modest 17 per cent alcohol.

The resulting Utopias is strong, dark and complex, more like a cross between a good port and a whisky than anything resembling a standard beer. The rum barrels weren’t used in previous editions, adding a new twist to the current blend.

And, “all the beers we use in it are now a year older. It’s never going to be exactly the same from year to year,” said Koch.

In late 2010, the LCBO put roughly 70 bottles of Utopias on sale via a lottery. Well over 1,000 people entered. In late 2011, the LCBO got another 250 bottles which it sold over the phone. They too were gone in about three hours.

Koch said he designed Utopias and Triple Bock as a way to expand people’s perception of what beer could be.

“I wanted people to realize that beer belonged with the very finest wines and spirits,” said Koch.