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Alcohol-free beer

A 330 ml serving of alcohol-free beer carries about 0.8 g of pure ethanol — 0.1 UK units, 0.1 US standard drinks, 0.1 Estonian/Finnish units — and roughly 112 kcal.

Never use this page to decide whether to drive. Clearance is an estimate from a simplified model and varies with your liver, your genetics, your medicines, food, sleep and illness — real elimination rates differ between people by a factor of two, and the model does not know which end you are at. The only safe level of alcohol for driving is none, and a legal limit is not a safety threshold. If you have been drinking, do not drive.

Low and no alcohol0.3% (0.0-0.5%)USDA basis: Malt beverage

Alcohol-free beer sits under the same 0.5% ABV threshold as kali, and most modern products come in well below it — many at 0.0 to 0.3%. The arithmetic is the point: a 330 ml can at 0.3% contains under a gram of ethanol, which is around a tenth of a UK unit and less than some ripe fruit and bread contain by the time you have eaten them.

The calorie saving is real but smaller than people expect. Removing the ethanol removes the 7 kcal per gram it was contributing, but the malt sugars that were never fermented stay behind, and several de-alcoholised products are back-sweetened to restore body. The result is typically somewhere around a third to a half of the energy of the equivalent full-strength beer rather than the near-zero people assume.

Where it genuinely changes the picture is pacing and clearance. Alternating alcohol-free with full-strength drinks halves the ethanol of an evening without halving the number of drinks, which is the one behavioural lever that works reliably for most people. And unlike every other drink on this page, nothing here needs to clear before you drive — though "alcohol-free" is a labelling category with a threshold, not a guarantee of zero, and if you are avoiding alcohol completely for medical or recovery reasons that distinction matters.

By serving size

What the strength range does

Where the calories come from

The carbohydrate figure below is the USDA FoodData Central row for Malt beverage — 8.1 g of carbohydrate (of which 8.1 g sugars) per 100 g — applied to 330 ml of this serving. USDA values are per 100 grams and this page applies them per 100 millilitres. Beer, wine and cider are close enough to the density of water for that to cost a per cent or two; spirits are lighter, so for them the approximation is worth about five per cent.

The USDA malt beverage row covers non-alcoholic malt drinks and is used here as the nearest listed basis. Modern alcohol-free beers vary widely; the label on the can is more accurate than any generic row.

As a cross-check, the same USDA row reports 37 kcal per 100 g, which scales to about 122 kcal for this serving against the 112 kcal computed above — a gap of about 8%. Two independent routes to the same figure will not land on the same digit: the reference row was measured on one specific product at one specific strength, this page uses the strength you would find on a typical label, and the per-100-g to per-100-ml conversion costs a little more. Where the gap is large, the strength assumption is almost always the reason.

Source: USDA FoodData Central SR Legacy (public domain) — row: Malt beverage · checked 2026-09-02

What it costs in walking

This is an energy comparison and nothing more. Walking does not undo a drink: the ethanol still has to be metabolised, it is still prioritised over other fuels while it is in the system, and the effect it has on sleep that night is not cancelled by exercise the following morning. The number is here because it makes an abstract quantity concrete, not because it is a plan.

See brisk walking for where the MET value comes from, or the whole exercise library for other movements.

Source: 2011 Compendium of Physical Activities (Ainsworth et al.) — MET value for brisk walking · checked 2026-09-02

Clearance estimate

Read those hours as the earliest plausible figure under a set of assumptions that will not all hold for you. Absorption is treated as instantaneous, so the model starts the clock too early. Elimination is treated as a fixed 0.15 ‰ an hour, when published individual rates run from roughly 0.10 to 0.20 — at the slow end, the last column takes a third longer than it says. And the whole calculation is for one dose taken at one moment, not for three drinks spread across an evening, which is the situation that actually produces a morning-after problem.

Never use this page to decide whether to drive. Clearance is an estimate from a simplified model and varies with your liver, your genetics, your medicines, food, sleep and illness — real elimination rates differ between people by a factor of two, and the model does not know which end you are at. The only safe level of alcohol for driving is none, and a legal limit is not a safety threshold. If you have been drinking, do not drive.

The thing people get wrong

Assuming zero calories. The alcohol is gone; the malt sugars mostly are not.

Frequently asked questions

Other drinks

All drinks and the calculator · Exercise library · Daily calorie needs · Sleep calculator