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Mojito

A 220 ml serving of mojito carries about 15.8 g of pure ethanol — 2.0 UK units, 1.1 US standard drinks, 1.3 Estonian/Finnish units — and roughly 157 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.

Mixed drinks50 ml at 40.0%USDA basis: Daiquiri

Cocktails are the hardest category to put numbers on, because the recipe is the product. A mojito built with 50 ml of white rum, the juice of half a lime, two teaspoons of sugar or a measure of sugar syrup, mint and soda water is a defensible standard version — and every bar makes it differently. The page computes the ethanol from the rum pour, which is the part you can actually pin down.

The sugar is the part that separates a cocktail from everything else here. In beer, wine and cider the carbohydrate is residual: what the yeast did not eat. In a mojito it is added on purpose, to balance the lime. Two teaspoons of sugar is around eight grams — small in isolation, but cocktails are rarely singular, and three of them is a substantial amount of added sugar on top of three spirit measures.

The volume is also misleading in the opposite direction from a shot. A tall glass full of ice, mint and soda looks like a long, dilute drink, and the ethanol in it is the same as a double vodka. That is the general rule for cocktails: judge them by the spirit measures that went in, never by the size of the glass they came out in. The clearance estimate on this page uses the spirit pour for exactly that reason.

By serving size

Where the calories come from

The carbohydrate figure below is the USDA FoodData Central row for Daiquiri — 6.9 g of carbohydrate (of which 5.6 g sugars) per 100 g — applied to 170 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.

There is no mojito row in the reference database. The daiquiri row is used as the nearest listed basis for the sugar side, because a daiquiri is the same rum, lime and sugar base; a real mojito adds mint and soda water, which change the volume but not the sugar much.

There is no whole-drink cross-check available here, because the reference row covers the mixer only. The ethanol half of the table is exact arithmetic from the spirit pour; the carbohydrate half is the reference row for the mixer. A published total for the finished drink does not exist in this database, and the page will not invent one.

Source: USDA FoodData Central SR Legacy (public domain) — row: Daiquiri · 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

Ice and soda are not dilution in any way that matters. The ethanol is whatever went in from the bottle.

Frequently asked questions

Other drinks

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