Do you wonder how many calories in that beer?

Paolinat

Yes, the best way to lose weight is not to consume alcohol. However, on occasion, when a yummy microbrew finds its way into your hand, you must drink it and hopefully enter it in your food diary.
Here's how to figure out the calories:

http://beercritic.wordpress.com/beer-calorie-cheatsheet/

I find it very important to have some idea of what I’m drinkingin terms of calories, because I’ve lost over 100 pounds, and the only struggle I’ve encountered in keeping it off is my absolute love of really great beer. With this in mind, I’m sharing a simple formula that I modified from a few other bloggers (such as beercommdood) struggling with the same concept:
fl. oz. *ABV = potency / 60 =beers * 150 C = Estimated Calories.
With an average beer (indicated as beers below) at 5% in a 12 fl oz size coming out to about 150 calories on average, applying this formula to a standard brew (e.g. a Budweiser) works like this:
A 12 fl. oz. Budweiser * 5% ABV = 60 (potency)/ 60 = 1 beers * 150 Calories = 150 estimated Calories
Based very much on the idea that we know grams of alcohol are specifically increasing along with ABV, even though grams of carbs/fat/protein if any may be staying the same or becoming less per volume in order to make room for the alcohol grams, we can gather that calories are increasing along with ABV. You might not have known but calories per gram of alcohol are similar to fat grams, and here’s some nutritional science on that:
Calculating calories per gram of carbohydrates, fat or protein is easy. All you need to remember is that:

* 1 gram of carbohydrate = 4 calories
* 1 gram of protein = 4 calories
* 1 gram of fat = 9 calories
* 1 gram of alcohol = 7 calories

So with this in mind, we can derive a scale with which we can fairly accurately guess at the caloric content of beers according to the ABV rating, which is usually able to be determined via thebottle or web site.
12*5% = 60 / 60 = 1.0 * 150 = 150C (e.g. Budweiser American Ale)
12*6% = 72 / 60 = 1.2 * 150 = 180C (e.g. half a Rogue Shakespeare Stout)
12*7% = 84 / 60 = 1.4 * 150 = 210C (e.g. Sierra Nevada Torpedo)
12*8% = 96 / 60 = 1.6 * 150 = 240C (e.g. Russian River Pliny the Elder)
12*9% = 108 / 60 = 1.8 * 150 = 270C (e.g. half a Brooklyn’s Local 2)
12*10% = 120 / 60 = 2.0 * 150 = 300C (e.g. half a Brooklyn Black Ops)
12*11% = 132 / 60 = 2.2 * 150 = 330C (e.g. Rochefort Trappistes 10 Ale)
12*12% = 144 / 60 = 2.4 * 150 = 360C (e.g. Dogfish Head Santo Palo Marron)
12*13% = 156 / 60 = 2.6 * 150 = 390C
12*14% = 168 / 60 = 2.8 * 150 = 410C
12*15% = 180 / 60 = 3.0 * 150 = 440C
12*16% = 192 / 60 = 3.2 * 150 = 470C
12*17% = 210 / 60 = 3.4 * 150 = 500C (e.g. Mikkeller 黑)
12*18% = 222 / 60 = 3.6 * 150 = 530C (e.g. half a Dogfish Head World Wide Stout)
12*19% = 234/ 60 = 3.8 * 150 = 560C
12*20% = 246 / 60 = 4.0 * 150 = 590C
12*21% = 258/ 60 = 4.2 * 150 = 620C (e.g. Dogfish Head’s 120 Minute IPA)
With this, we can deduct that a 12 fl oz Dogfish Head 120 Minute IPA (at a whopping 21% ABV) is a bit less than 2x our caloric rating for a 12 fl oz at 11% ABV (660C) or 12% ABV (720C). No matter, one bottle is about a third of a 2000 calorie daily diet.
We might also want to use these numbers to indicate how many average beers (the beers in my formula an the bud points in beercommdood formula) in order to get a guage of of Blood Alcohol Content. The following link is a BAC chart for men (look on that page for the Women’s chart) that breaks it down by hours of drinking. In America, a BAC of 08 is the legal threshold. http://www.moderation.org/bac/bac-men.shtml

shovav91

Great information! Thanks!