Beer Forum

I am conscious about calories when I cook and drink. I have lost 70 pounds since April and still have some more to go. I have done all this while still being able to enjoy the foods and beers that I love. I am, however, a newbie when it comes to cooking with beer.

I have a bunch of homebrew I need to use up to get some free bottles for my next batch so I decided I'll cook with some of it. I know how to roughly calculate calories in homebrew, and I know most of the calories in beer come from the alcohol. However, when you cook with beer, the alcohol burns off, so my question is thus:

How can I approximate the amount of calories I am getting from my beer when cooking with it, AFTER the alcohol is burned off?

Since you don't need to know alcohol calories (although a small amount may remain), you only are going to want to calculate your carbohydrate calories.

Carb calories per 12 oz bottle = 4.0*(RE -0.1)*FG*3.55

Where RE (real extract) = 0.1808*Pi + 0.8192*Pf

Where Pi (degrees Plato initial) = -463.37 + 668.72*OG -205.35*OG^2

Where Pf (degrees Plato final) = -463.37 + 668.72*FG -205.35*FG^2

You can get an approximation of degrees Plato by dividing the last two digits of your specific gravity by 4 instead.

If you had a beer that started with an OG of 1.052, and finished at 1.012, using the approximations for Pi and Pf, you would have 13 P and 3 P respectively.

RE = 0.1808*13 + 0.8192*3 = 4.808
CarbC = 4.0*(4.808 -0.1)*1.012*3.55 = 67.66 calories

Using the long calculations for Plato, you would get
RE = 0.1808*12.86 + 0.8192*3.07 = 4.84
CarbC = 4.0*(4.84 -0.1)*1.012*3.55 = 68.1 calories

So the Plato approximations are probably close enough.

If you want to know calories due to alcohol, you can get them from the formula
6.9*ABW*FG*3.55 = EthanolC

Where ABW = [((OG-FG)/0.75)*.79]/FG

Adding EthanolC and CarbC will give you total calories for the beer...


I think that the new version of How to Brew may have a simpler form of these calculations, I couldn't find it on the online version. I modified these formula based on the work of Peter Ensminger.

This is a tremendous help, thank you very much!