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Lager or pilsner beer

A 500 ml serving of lager or pilsner beer carries about 17.8 g of pure ethanol — 2.2 UK units, 1.3 US standard drinks, 1.5 Estonian/Finnish units — and roughly 196 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.

Beer and cider4.5% (4.0-5.5%)USDA basis: Beer

Lager is the drink where serving size matters more than strength. At around 4.5% ABV the alcohol content per hundred millilitres is modest, but nobody drinks beer in hundred-millilitre measures. A half-litre glass at that strength carries more ethanol than a 40 ml shot of vodka, which surprises most people the first time they run the arithmetic.

The calorie side has two components and they behave differently. Ethanol contributes about 7 kcal per gram and cannot be reduced without reducing the alcohol. Residual carbohydrate — unfermented sugars and dextrins left over from the malt — contributes 4 kcal per gram and varies with the style and how far the fermentation went. In a standard lager the ethanol is the larger of the two by a wide margin, which is why "light" beers cut strength rather than carbohydrate when they want to cut calories.

The other thing lager does is make pacing invisible. Because each glass is large and low in strength, a session drifts upward slowly. Counting glasses is a bad proxy for counting alcohol when the glass size changes between a 330 ml bottle, a 400 ml continental glass and a British pint of 568 ml — the same "one beer" spans a 70% range in ethanol before you touch the strength.

By serving size

What the strength range does

Where the calories come from

The carbohydrate figure below is the USDA FoodData Central row for Beer — 3.6 g of carbohydrate (of which 0.0 g sugars) per 100 g — applied to 500 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.

As a cross-check, the same USDA row reports 43 kcal per 100 g, which scales to about 215 kcal for this serving against the 196 kcal computed above — a gap of about 9%. 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: Beer · 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

How many reach a weekly guideline

The 112 g line is the UK Chief Medical Officers' 14 units a week, quoted here because it is the guideline most often referenced in English. It is not the only one and it is not necessarily the one that applies to you: national low-risk guidance differs between countries, is written in different unit sizes, and has been revised downward in several places in recent years. Look up the guideline where you live and convert it with the table above.

Source: UK Chief Medical Officers' low risk drinking guidelines — named example only · 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

Glass size, not strength. A pint and a small bottle of the same beer differ by nearly three quarters in ethanol.

Frequently asked questions

Other drinks

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