How Many Calories Are In The Beer You Drink

As a craft beer lover I know that many of the beers I drink aren’t exactly “light” on calories, especially when I go through a 22oz bomber of 7%+ ABV beer   I’m not going to stop drinking beer because of the calories but I do try to balance my calorie intake with my activity in order to keep everything in line.  The problem is trying to determine how many calories are actually in the beer.

The Gravity Of The Situation

I’ve been a home brewer off and on and know from my limited experience that there are two key numbers when brewing beer, Original Gravity and Final Gravity.  These numbers let you know how much sugar is in the beer before and after fermentation.  You can use these two numbers to figure out all kinds of things about the beer, including alcohol content, and ultimately, calories.  The “problem” is that it takes some math to come up with the calories.  You have to convert the gravity numbers into something call “Real Extract” then use that in a formula, along with ABW (which is derived from ABV), etc, etc…   Here’s the “formula”:

Calories/12oz Beer= [(6.9xABW)+4.0 x (RE-0.1)]xFGx3.55

Pretty neat, huh?  The formula works great if you know the original and final gravity numbers for the beer but most beers don’t tell you those numbers.  You can almost always find the ABV though, which helps a little but doesn’t tell the whole story.  Most of the calories in beer are from the alcohol but there is also unfermented sugars left in the beer that also have calories.  So, we have to guess a bit as to what the gravity numbers are in order to get an approximate range of calories.  Luckily the ABV, along with the style of beer helps narrow the field some.

The bottom line is that I created a spreadsheet that I can use to get an estimate of the calories in the beer I review/drink.  I will begin listing this in the beer reviews to help me, and anyone else who is interested, get a handle on their calorie intake.  Here’s my YouTube video explaining this:

Of course, I didn’t create the formula myself.  Here’s a link to the site I used to get the formulas I used to create my spreadsheet:

http://hbd.org/ensmingr/

There are a bunch of other resources on the web if you are interested.  Just search for “calculating calorie content of beer” or something similar and you will find plenty of reading material.