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Strong beer, IPA or stout

A 330 ml serving of strong beer, ipa or stout carries about 19.5 g of pure ethanol — 2.4 UK units, 1.4 US standard drinks, 1.6 Estonian/Finnish units — and roughly 141 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 cider7.5% (6.0-9.5%)USDA basis: Higher alcohol beer

Strong beer breaks the mental model people build on lager. The glass is often smaller — a 330 ml can rather than a half-litre — which reads as restraint, while the strength can be nearly double. Two 330 ml cans at 8% carry more ethanol than three half-litres of a 4.5% lager, in less than half the liquid.

The style spread is genuinely wide. Session IPAs sit near ordinary lager strength; double IPAs, imperial stouts and barley wines run from 8% into the low teens. Because the strength is printed on the can and the volume is printed on the can, this is one of the few drinks where you can get an exact ethanol figure with no estimation at all — the calculator on this page just multiplies.

Calories follow the same split as any beer, but the balance shifts. More fermentable sugar was converted, so the ethanol share of the energy rises; heavily-hopped and barrel-aged styles often also leave more residual carbohydrate behind. The practical consequence is that a strong beer is roughly a meal-sized amount of energy in a glass you can finish in twenty minutes, without the fullness that a meal would bring.

There is a counting problem specific to this category. Strong beers are usually drunk one at a time and slowly, which makes them feel like a controlled choice, and they are frequently the second half of an evening that started on something weaker. Because the strength varies so widely within the style, "two IPAs" describes anything from roughly three to nearly seven UK units depending on which cans they were. The label is the only thing that settles it.

By serving size

What the strength range does

Where the calories come from

The carbohydrate figure below is the USDA FoodData Central row for Higher alcohol beer — 0.3 g of carbohydrate (of which 0.0 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.

As a cross-check, the same USDA row reports 58 kcal per 100 g, which scales to about 191 kcal for this serving against the 141 kcal computed above — a gap of about 27%. 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: Higher alcohol 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

The small glass. A 330 ml can at 8% is not a small drink; it is a large one in a small container.

Frequently asked questions

Other drinks

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