© Chiswick Auctions

These two historic cans fetched a historic price, too.

Wine is expensive enough, but who'd have thought you could pay so much for a humble beer?

We've all had that moment when the bar tab arrives and the number is larger than expected, but an auction in London has raised the price of a beer to a whole new level.

The sale, at Chiswick Auctions, saw two cans of beer from a small brewery in South Wales fetch what might be a record price: $2850 each, making even the most expensive craft brews pale by comparison.

The beers, dating from 1936, came from the Felinfoel Brewery, just outside the rugby-mad town of Llanelli (or "Llanelly" as it is styled on the cans), about 55 miles west of the Welsh capital Cardiff. The brewery was the first outside the US to produce beer in cans and the company had a contract to supply the UK Ministry of Defence at the time, so it is likely they were kept by a soldier and passed down through the family.

The beers were expected to fetch somewhere between $1250 and $2000, but the brewery itself outbid everyone else to lay its hands on two pieces of its own heritage. The two cans were in excellent condition, one can still full, although the other has lost some (but not all) of the liquid inside to evaporation from the base of the can, where the seal had weakened.

The brewery is still a family-owned concern (after a long battle for control) and is perhaps best known for its Double Dragon ale, which was named the best draught beer in the world in 1976 and has cult status in Wales. Pronounced "vellin-voil", the brewery is often humorously referred to as "Feeling Foul" by many of its enthusiastic consumers.

Founded in the mid-1830s, when David John bought a coaching inn across the road from his home in the village of Felinfoel, and began brewing beer. A purpose-built brewery eventually followed in 1878 and the beer became a favorite among workers in the local tinplate industry. That industry was important (at the time, Wales produced 90 percent of the world's tinplate) but not just as a ready market for the ale – it was crucial to the eventual canning of beer.

Few brewers believed that drinkers would ever accept beer in a can. Customers expected beer to be on draught from a cask, or in a glass bottle. Advocates of the can pointed out that ale had been enjoyed in pewter mugs for centuries, but few were convinced. Much more of a concern were the serious technical problems. Beer required a container that could withstand a pressure in excess of 80 pounds per square inch. Food cans, which had been established as early as 1812, only needed to withstand 25-35lbs.

There was also the question of flavor contamination. Beer reacted with the bare tinplate, leaving a tinny taste. But coating with the traditional brewers' pitch, as used in casks, was no use in the smaller container. Indeed, when the Gottfried Kruger Brewing Company of Newark New Jersey released the first canned beer in early 1935, the beer had to be pasteurized to avoid contamination.

The Welsh outift's head brewer Sidney John claimed that meant the Felinfoel beer was better, claiming the Americans had brewed a beer to suit the can, while Felinfoel had found a can "to hold the perfect beer".

"Their beer is being pasteurized and the result is that the natural ingredients are being destroyed. That is not and will not be the case with our beer," he boasted proudly.

Felinfoel had taken the canning of beer seriously once it realized that a local rival, Buckley's, was also researching it. Felinfoel lined its cans with wax to avoid losing flavor and managed to beat Buckley's to the punch, releasing a version to the public in 1936. It was a huge success, and also a handy fillip for the tinplate industry.

The price is thought to be a record price paid for beer, although beer prices can be surprisingly high.

The most expensive beer listed on Wine-Searcher is the Sam Adams Utopia range, with an average price of $443, boosted by some older vintages commanding prices as high as $800. The most expensive regularly available beer from the UK we have listed is Brewdog's Paradox Jura Whisky Cask Aged Imperial Stout at a relatively modest $30 average pre-tax price.

And notwithstanding the fact that an Australian journalist somehow managed to be charged $69,000 for a single pint of Deuchars IPA in England earlier this month – it's a very nice pint, but the price was an error; it averages $3 on Wine-Searcher – we can't find a more expensive beer than the cans of Felinfoel. A bottle of Nails Brewing's Antarctic Ale sold at auction in Australia almost 10 years ago for the equivalent of $1257, and a 750ml bottle of Cantillon Loerik geuze sold at auction for $2590 after its release in 2003.