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Cider

A 500 ml serving of cider carries about 18.5 g of pure ethanol — 2.3 UK units, 1.3 US standard drinks, 1.5 Estonian/Finnish units — and roughly 248 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 cider4.7% (3.5-7.0%)USDA basis: Hard cider

Cider is the drink on this page where the non-alcohol calories actually matter. Beer, wine and spirits carry most of their energy as ethanol; a sweet commercial cider carries a substantial share as residual sugar, because the fermentation is stopped or the product is back-sweetened deliberately. The USDA reference row used here reports several grams of sugar per hundred millilitres, which over a half-litre is a meaningful addition on top of the alcohol.

Strength varies more than people expect. Mass-market ciders sit around beer strength; traditional dry farmhouse ciders and some Baltic and British bottlings run considerably higher, into the range where a half-litre carries as much ethanol as three shots of spirits. As always the number is printed on the container, which makes guessing unnecessary.

The perception problem with cider is that it tastes like a soft drink. Sweetness masks ethanol, carbonation speeds gastric emptying, and the serving is large. Those three together make cider one of the easiest drinks to underestimate — which is a pacing problem rather than a nutrition one, and the reason the clearance warning on this page applies to it as strongly as to anything else.

A note on the dry-versus-sweet choice, since it is the only real lever here. Moving from a sweet commercial cider to a dry one removes most of the sugar and none of the alcohol, so the calorie saving is real but partial — typically a fifth to a quarter of the total rather than half. Reducing the strength or the volume is the only thing that changes the larger half of the number.

By serving size

What the strength range does

Where the calories come from

The carbohydrate figure below is the USDA FoodData Central row for Hard cider — 5.9 g of carbohydrate (of which 5.9 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 56 kcal per 100 g, which scales to about 280 kcal for this serving against the 248 kcal computed above — a gap of about 12%. 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: Hard cider · 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

Sweetness hiding strength. It tastes like a soft drink and is not one.

Frequently asked questions

Other drinks

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