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Cream and coffee liqueur

A 50 ml serving of cream and coffee liqueur carries about 7.9 g of pure ethanol — 1.0 UK units, 0.6 US standard drinks, 0.7 Estonian/Finnish units — and roughly 149 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 drinks20.0% (15.0-30.0%)USDA basis: Coffee liqueur

Liqueurs are sweetened spirits, and the sweetening is not subtle. The USDA reference row for coffee liqueur reports well over forty grams of carbohydrate per hundred millilitres — an order of magnitude more than wine and several times more than cider. In energy terms a liqueur is closer to a dessert than to a drink, which is roughly how it is used.

Strength sits in an awkward middle. At 15 to 30% ABV a liqueur is far stronger than wine and considerably weaker than a spirit, and the small glass makes it feel weaker still. Fifty millilitres of a 20% liqueur carries about the ethanol of a small glass of wine, delivered in a tenth of the volume and with several times the sugar.

The pattern that catches people is the after-dinner sequence: wine with the meal, then a liqueur or two afterwards because they seem inconsequential. Each one is a small drink by volume and a real one by ethanol, and they arrive at the end of the evening when the earlier drinks are still being processed. That is precisely the situation the clearance estimate on this page handles worst, and precisely the situation in which people most often assume they are fine to drive the next morning.

By serving size

What the strength range does

Where the calories come from

The carbohydrate figure below is the USDA FoodData Central row for Coffee liqueur — 46.8 g of carbohydrate (of which 38.3 g sugars) per 100 g — applied to 50 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 336 kcal per 100 g, which scales to about 168 kcal for this serving against the 149 kcal computed above — a gap of about 11%. 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: Coffee liqueur · 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 sugar. This is the one drink here where the non-alcohol calories can exceed the alcohol ones.

Frequently asked questions

Other drinks

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