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Kali / kvass (non-alcoholic)

A 330 ml serving of kali / kvass (non-alcoholic) carries about 1.0 g of pure ethanol — 0.1 UK units, 0.1 US standard drinks, 0.1 Estonian/Finnish units — and roughly 114 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 alcohol0.4% (0.0-0.5%)USDA basis: Malt beverage

Kali — kvass in Russian and Ukrainian, and a staple of the Estonian summer — is a lightly fermented drink made from rye bread or malt. Because it is fermented, it contains a trace of ethanol; because the fermentation is stopped early, that trace normally stays at or below 0.5% ABV, which is the threshold at which a drink can be labelled non-alcoholic in the EU.

That trace is worth putting in perspective rather than ignoring. At 0.4% a 330 ml bottle contains around a gram of ethanol, roughly an eighth of a UK unit. You would need something like eight bottles to reach the ethanol in a single half-litre of ordinary lager, and the volume alone makes that impractical. For almost every purpose the alcohol in kali is arithmetically irrelevant — which is exactly why it belongs on this page, as the reference point that shows what "trace" actually means.

The sugar is the part that is not irrelevant. Commercial kali is sweetened, and the reference row used here reflects a malt drink with a real carbohydrate load. It is a soft drink in nutritional terms, and should be counted as one. The reason it earns a place in an alcohol calculator is that it is the drink people reach for when they want the ritual without the ethanol, and knowing the trace figure is what makes that choice an informed one rather than a hopeful one.

One caveat worth stating plainly: traditionally home-brewed kali is not standardised, and a long uncontrolled fermentation can push the strength above the commercial threshold. If you are avoiding alcohol for a medical, religious or recovery reason, a bottle with a label is the only version this page can say anything useful about.

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.

Kali has no row of its own in the reference database; the USDA malt beverage row (which covers non-alcoholic malt drinks) is used as the nearest listed basis. Commercial recipes differ, and the sugar content on the label of the bottle in front of you beats 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 114 kcal computed above — a gap of about 6%. 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

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

Home-brewed batches. Commercial kali is controlled below 0.5%; a long home fermentation is not.

Frequently asked questions

Other drinks

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