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Calorie Content of Beer?

Thursday, September 3rd, 2009 | Beer

My initial reaction to the question ‘How many calories are in beer?’ is who gives a crap?  If you really care about losing weight, you should probably not drink beer at all.  But then if you care about being happy, you probably should drink beer and just not care about calories.  However, many of you do seem to care about the calorie content of beer, particularly of Bud Light Lime.  Going through our top search keywords in Google Analytics, meaning keywords Googlers are using to find our site, I found the following ranked rather high up:

• bud light lime calories
• bud light lime sucks
• calories in bud light lime
• bud light lime ingredients

What does this mean?  It means that a lot of Bud Light Lime drinkers are after it because they think it is diet beer or because they think they can drink twice as many of them without getting fat (or something similarly depressing).  It also means that a good portion of you hate Bud Light Lime as much as I do, which gives me hope.  A few of my friends have told me they are getting sick of me ragging on Bud Light Lime, so this will be my final mention of it.  It really is that bad though; this is why I think so:

• It tastes bad. It tastes like Sprite gone off.  I’ve heard people say ‘it’s not that bad’, but why not settle for half decent, pretty good, or better yet, actually good?  I don’t understand why someone would want to drink Bud Light Lime when they could have any one of the wonderful beers that I listed in my previous post that garnered so much attention.
• Real Lime Flavor. This is not the same as real limes, real lime juice, or real lime anything.  Real lime flavor implies something unnatural and, more importantly, unnecessary.  If it is lime you are after, try this: buy a lime, cut it, squeeze it, and then let the juice drip into a beer.

Anyway, the purpose of this post was not to rag on Bud Light Lime one last time, but to talk about the calories in beer.  I’ve heard many mentions of ‘a meal in a glass’ in reference to dark beers before, but the color of beer has nothing to do with calorie content.  I’ve also heard complaints that beer makes you full.  In my opinion, beer should make you full because it is food, but that extra full feeling one gets comes from carbonation or nitrogenation.  The gasses remain in your stomach and make you feel ‘foamy’, as Erik and I call it when we’ve had a few too many.  In reality, the colorie content of beer has most to do with alcohol levels and residual unfermented sugars in the beer.  The alcohol content of a beer will be most indicative of calorie content.  For example, a 10% ABV beer will likely have close to twice as many calories as a 5% ABV beer.  Now for the actual numbers:

• Bud Light Lime has 116 calories per 12oz
• Bud Light has 110 calories per 12oz
• Guinness has 210 calories per 20oz pint
• Normal 5% beer ~ 150 calories per 12oz
• Normal 7% beer ~ 220 calories per 12oz
• Normal 10% beer ~ 300 calories per 12oz

It seems to me, you are generally looking at about 30 calories per percentage alcohol point in a 12 ounce serving of beer.  Is the 30 calorie savings that Bud Light Lime offers over a good beer worth it?  Rest assured that I’ll be choosing quality over quantity until the end of my days.

Cheers,

Chris

Tags: alcohol content, bud light lime calories, bud light lime sucks, calories in beer, google analytics, guinness, meal in a glass, real lime flavor

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