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Sake

A 180 ml serving of sake carries about 21.3 g of pure ethanol — 2.7 UK units, 1.5 US standard drinks, 1.8 Estonian/Finnish units — and roughly 185 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.

Wine15.0% (13.0-17.0%)USDA basis: Sake

Sake is brewed rather than distilled, but it is stronger than wine — typically 13 to 17% ABV, occasionally higher before dilution. The traditional 180 ml measure, one gō, therefore carries appreciably more ethanol than a standard glass of wine, and the small ochoko cups it is often poured into make it very hard to track how many gō have gone past.

Compositionally it sits between beer and wine. The USDA reference row shows several grams of carbohydrate per hundred millilitres — more than a dry wine, less than a cider — because rice starch conversion leaves residual sugars behind. Most of the energy is still ethanol, but the carbohydrate column is not negligible the way it is for a dry white.

Service temperature is the practical trap. Warm sake is absorbed faster than cold, and the ritual of continuous topping-up from a shared flask makes counting almost impossible. If you want a usable figure for an evening, the honest approach is to count the flasks rather than the cups, and to note that a standard tokkuri is roughly one to one and a half gō.

It is also worth knowing that most sake reaching export markets has been diluted before bottling. Fermentation can push the strength into the high teens or beyond, and water is added to bring it back to the 15% or so that is normal on a label. That means the number on the bottle is reliable — but it also means the range within the category is wider than the wine analogy suggests, and undiluted genshu bottlings sit noticeably higher than the figure this page uses as its default.

By serving size

What the strength range does

Where the calories come from

The carbohydrate figure below is the USDA FoodData Central row for Sake — 5.0 g of carbohydrate (of which 0.0 g sugars) per 100 g — applied to 180 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 134 kcal per 100 g, which scales to about 241 kcal for this serving against the 185 kcal computed above — a gap of about 23%. 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: Sake · 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

Continuous refills from a shared flask. Count flasks, not cups.

Frequently asked questions

Other drinks

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