Love Good Beer

Calorie Content of Beer?

Thursday, September 3rd, 2009 | Beer | 5 Comments

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

Is Guinness Remarkable?

Thursday, July 2nd, 2009 | Beer | 4 Comments

Earlier this week, we received the email below from Brenna, a PR firm employee representing Guinness in Canada:

Dear Erik and Chris,

I read your blog and I’m sorry to hear that the Whistler Beer Festival was cancelled. It sounds like you guys had a fun time anyway! My name is Brenna and I am contacting you on behalf of Guinness Canada. Guinness is celebrating its 250^th anniversary, and as one of Canada’s influential beer writers, I thought you might be interested in helping us celebrate.

In the spirit of Arthur Guinness and his remarkable contributions, we want to recognize and discuss what remarkable means to Canada.  We are seeking requests for remarkable experiences through our Web site that Guinness Canada will fulfill for a lucky number of winners – one of which could be you or one of your readers.

Please let me know if you would like additional information about the Be Remarkable Canada campaign to pass along to your readers, and we hope you check out www.guinness.ca/beremarkablecanada or the supporting news release http://www2.guinness.com/en-ca/Pages/pressrelease.aspx

You can also follow us on Twitter (@remarkable250) where we will be sharing remarkable links to get people thinking about “remarkable” and on Facebook where we will be sharing all the submissions to spur further discussion around the concept of remarkable.

With all these online initiatives, we hope you will help us to define what remarkable means to this generation of Canadians. You’ll see from the first video on the news release page that we have already asked some people to share their thoughts.

Happy Canada Day!

Cheers,

Brenna

I think what Brenna’s firm is trying to do for Guinness is kind of cool, although I’m sure they are being paid handsomely to get them some publicity.  I appreciate that Brenna at least read one of our posts and personalized her email to us, but I don’t believe she is a regular reader.  If she were a regular reader, she would know that we aren’t some of Canada’s influential beer writers!  I’m not a huge fan of PR, mostly because it usually isn’t coming from a point of passion.  Brenna is probably a very nice person and very good at her job, but she might not even drink Guinness or stout beer in general.  I like that Guinness is paying to make some dreams come true, but does that have anything to do with remarkable beer?  I suppose there isn’t much more Canadian than a pint of Guinness…wait, what?

So I ask the question, is Guinness a remarkable beer?  I drink Guinness from time to time, but I personally don’t find it to be a remarkable tasting beer.  It is a very smooth (nitrogenated) and drinkable Dry Irish Stout, but is not the best rated example of the style on Beer Advocate, not to say that BA is the be all and end all of beer ranking.  I seem to recall drinking more interesting and enjoyable stouts (Old Yale Sasquatch is rather delicious) and I would have to say that I place Guinness at the low end of the taste scale.

What I do find remarkable about Guinness is its longevity and global brand power.  In the world of mass market beer, there is yellow beer (macro lagers) and there is Guinness.  At some point in the past, whether it be by luck or considerable marketing skill, Guinness became THE dark beer.  I sort of hate that every dark beer any uninitiated beer drinker drinks or sees reminds them of Guinness.  There is such a range of wonderful dark beers out there (that’s a whole other post), but all anyone ever thinks they are getting is “a meal in a glass”.  This is another common phrase that I hate, because Guinness contains less calories than most other macro beers.  It is the bubbles that make you feel full.  Anyway, I do find the Guinness brand remarkable, just not the beer.  That being said, I wonder what a pint of Guinness tasted 50, 100, 150, 200, and 250 years ago?  I’m not saying that the current Guinness is bad, because I do drink it, but I bet it used to taste wonderfully different.

Cheers,

Chris

PS> The Guinness Book of World Records guy worked at Guinness in the 1950′s, not the same guy who made the beer 250 years ago.

Tags: be remarkable canada, dry irish stout, guinness, guinness book of world records, meal in a glass, nitrogenated, old yale sasquatch stout, remarkable250, stout