How the calorie figures are worked out
Every drink in the table above starts from the same published figure: calories per 100ml, sourced from USDA FoodData Central and McCance & Widdowson's Composition of Foods, the UK's official nutrient database. From that one number, this page works out three more.
A UK pint of 4% lager is 568ml. At 43 kcal per 100ml, that is 43 × 568 ÷ 100, about 244 kcal in the pint, before you have added a single mixer. A 175ml glass of 12.5% red wine at 85 kcal per 100ml comes to roughly 149 kcal, and a 25ml shot of 40% vodka at 231 kcal per 100ml comes to roughly 58 kcal. The "kcal/100ml" column lets you compare drinks by strength alone; the "kcal/serve" column is what actually lands in the glass in front of you, and the two can rank drinks in a different order once serving sizes differ this much.
Calories per UK unit, and the 14-units guideline
A UK unit of alcohol is defined as 10ml of pure ethanol, about 8 grams. The standard formula for working out units from a serve is printed below, and it is the same one used by NHS and gov.uk unit calculators.
That pint of 4% lager: 568 × 4 ÷ 1000 is about 2.27 units. Divide the pint's roughly 244 kcal by those 2.27 units and you get about 108 kcal per unit, the "kcal/unit" column in the table. This figure is the one that actually separates drinks fairly: it asks "how many calories am I paying for each unit of alcohol I get", stripping out the effect of serving size that "kcal/serve" cannot. Some results are counterintuitive. A 275ml alcopop at 4% ABV works out at around 152 kcal per unit, the highest figure in this dataset, because a fair chunk of its calories come from added sugar rather than the alcohol itself. A 125ml flute of champagne, by contrast, comes in around 63 kcal per unit, among the lowest, helped by both a lower kcal/100ml figure and a smaller standard pour.
The UK Chief Medical Officers' low-risk drinking guideline, published in 2016, recommends not regularly drinking more than 14 units a week, spread across three or more days rather than in one or two sessions. The round builder below totals the units in whatever you add and shows that total as a percentage of 14, purely as a reference point; it is not a target to hit or a verdict on any single evening. If you want to see how a session translates into an estimated blood alcohol reading and an elimination timeline instead of calories, the BAC calculator covers that separately.
Why alcohol calories are sneaky
Protein and carbohydrate provide about 4 kcal per gram, fat about 9, figures known as the Atwater general factors and printed on every nutrition label. Alcohol has its own figure, about 7 kcal per gram, sitting between carbohydrate and fat, and it is almost never printed anywhere on a bottle or can.
This dataset's own numbers show why that matters. Vodka, gin and rum in this table carry 0g of protein, 0g of carbohydrate and 0g of fat per 100ml, yet still list 231 kcal per 100ml. Run the standard 4-4-9 label maths on those three zeros and you get zero calories; the true figure is 231. Every one of those calories comes from alcohol itself, a fourth energy source the standard macronutrient panel was never built to show. It is not a labelling error: alcoholic drinks are simply exempt from the calorie declaration that applies to almost every other packaged food and drink sold in the UK, which is exactly why a page like this one has to work the figure out from first principles instead of reading it off a label.
Beyond the missing label, alcohol's calories behave differently once you have drunk them. Research on appetite and intake consistently finds that calories from alcohol do not trigger the same fullness response as an equivalent amount of food, and some studies find alcohol mildly increases appetite in the short term. A 244 kcal pint is not "worth" the same as a 244 kcal snack in terms of how full it leaves you feeling, which is part of why alcohol calories are easy to underestimate across an evening.
The mixer is not innocent
The "Mixers, honestly" table above uses a single 25ml gin shot, 58 kcal, as a fixed reference point. Every mixer in that table, poured at its own standard serving, adds more calories on its own than the gin does: a 200ml serve of tonic water is about 68 kcal, a 330ml can of cola is about 135 kcal, and a 250ml can of a typical energy drink is around 113 kcal. Pour a full can of cola into a rum and coke, or a generous tonic into a gin and tonic, and the mixer is very often doing more calorie damage than the spirit it is supposedly there to dilute. Diet or "slimline" mixers avoid this almost entirely, since most owe their sweetness to non-nutritive sweeteners rather than sugar, but that swap only affects the mixer, not the spirit sitting underneath it.
What "light" or "low-calorie" beer actually means
In this dataset, a pint of 4% lager is about 244 kcal and a pint of 4% bitter or ale is about 182 kcal, a real difference of over 60 kcal between two drinks at the identical strength. That gap comes from the beer's own composition, mostly residual sugars and body, not from any special "diet" process. Marketed "light" beers, meanwhile, usually save calories chiefly by cutting the ABV: since alcohol supplies about 7 kcal per gram, a beer brewed to 3% instead of 5% has meaningfully fewer alcohol calories before the recipe changes at all. Reading the ABV on the label is a faster way to spot a genuinely lighter beer than reading the word "light" on the front of the can.
Building a round
Add each drink you are planning, or that you have already had, to the builder above and set how many standard serves of each. The total updates instantly: calories, the same total again in kilojoules, the units total, and a rough cheeseburger-equivalent figure using roughly 300 kcal as a typical fast-food cheeseburger, purely to put the number in an everyday frame, not as a diet target. The units total is checked against the weekly 14-unit guideline described above, again as a reference point rather than a verdict on the evening.
Questions people ask
Why does calories per UK unit vary so much between drinks?
Because two drinks can supply the same alcohol (the same number of units) while carrying very different amounts of sugar, residual carbohydrate or added flavouring alongside it. A dry spirit with a sugar-free mixer delivers alcohol with little else attached, while a sweet RTD or dessert wine delivers the same units wrapped in extra calories that have nothing to do with the alcohol itself.
Is "low-calorie" alcohol just a lower-ABV drink in disguise?
Very often, yes. Since alcohol itself supplies about 7 kcal per gram, cutting the ABV cuts calories almost automatically, before the brewer or distiller changes anything else about the recipe. It is a legitimate way to save calories, just worth recognising for what it is rather than assuming some other ingredient has been removed.
Why does the mixer sometimes have more calories than the spirit?
Because a standard mixer serving is usually far larger than a 25ml spirit shot, and full-sugar mixers carry real calories of their own. A 330ml can of cola on its own is around 135 kcal, more than double a 25ml gin shot's roughly 58 kcal, so the mixer can easily outweigh the spirit in a drink most people think of as "the gin" or "the rum" doing the damage.
How accurate are the calorie figures on this page?
They are typical published figures for each drink style and strength, sourced from USDA FoodData Central and the UK's McCance & Widdowson Composition of Foods database, the same references used throughout this site. Real products vary by brand, by exact ABV and by how a drink is actually poured, so treat every figure as a representative estimate rather than the calorie count of one specific bottle.
What is a UK unit, and how is the 14-units guideline worked out?
A UK unit is defined as 10ml of pure alcohol, about 8 grams, and is worked out as serve volume in millilitres multiplied by %ABV, divided by 1000. The UK Chief Medical Officers' 2016 guideline recommends not regularly drinking more than 14 units a week, spread across three or more days, as a low-risk reference point rather than a target.
Why isn't alcohol shown as a calorie source on drink labels the way protein or fat is?
Alcoholic drinks are exempt from the calorie declaration rules that apply to most other packaged food and drink in the UK, so the figure is simply left off rather than calculated incorrectly. Alcohol still supplies real energy, about 7 kcal per gram, a fourth source alongside protein, carbohydrate and fat that the standard macronutrient panel was never designed to capture.
This page compares typical published calorie and alcohol figures for common drink styles; it is not medical or nutrition advice and is not a tool for deciding how much to drink. It is not a substitute for guidance from a doctor, and it does not encourage drinking of any kind. If you are worried about your own or someone else's drinking, speak to a GP or contact a service such as Drinkaware or your national health service.