Calories in Cider vs Beer: Which Has More?

It depends entirely on what kind of cider, and the honest answer is more interesting than the usual one.

A pint of dry cider is roughly level with a pint of lager. A pint of fruit cider can carry half as much again, and in some cases more than a pint of strong craft IPA. The gap inside the cider category is far wider than the gap between cider and beer.

So the useful question isn't cider or beer. It's which cider.

Calories in cider: the popular brands

Figures per 500ml bottle, which is how most cider is sold, with the pint equivalent alongside for comparison with beer.

Two bottles of Rekorderlig is around 660 calories, which is roughly a bottle of wine, or a large fast food meal, depending on how you'd rather think about it.

Cider vs beer: the actual comparison

Look at where the dry ciders land. Strongbow comes in below a pint of Guinness and well below a pint of premium lager. Bulmers is level with lager. Neither supports the blanket claim that cider is worse than beer.

The fruit ciders are a different proposition entirely. Rekorderlig at around 375 a pint beats every mainstream beer on the market, including strong craft IPA.

Averaged across the category, cider does come out slightly ahead of beer, roughly 47 calories per 100ml against about 40 for mainstream lager. But that average hides the thing that actually matters.

Why fruit cider is so much higher

Two reasons, and the second one is the interesting one.

Apples start sweeter than grain. Cider is fermented from fruit juice, which arrives with a high natural sugar content. Beer is brewed from malted grain, where the sugars have to be converted from starch first. More sugar going in means more potential for sugar left over at the end.

The sweetness is usually added back. This is the part nobody advertises. A fully fermented cider is bone dry and fairly austere, closer to a sharp white wine than to what most people expect from a bottle of Kopparberg. To get the taste the market wants, producers back-sweeten after fermentation, adding sugar or juice concentrate to the finished cider.

So the sugar in a fruit cider isn't mostly leftover apple sugar that survived fermentation. A good deal of it was put there deliberately, after the fermenting was done.

The category has moved steadily in that direction. Dark fruits, strawberry and lime, passionfruit, mixed berry: the growth has all been at the sweet end, and the calorie figures have followed.

How much sugar is in cider?

A 500ml bottle of mainstream fruit cider commonly carries 20 to 30g of sugar. That's five to seven teaspoons, and it puts a single bottle in the same territory as a can of full-sugar cola.

Dry ciders are considerably lower, often under 5g in the same volume, because less was added back.

Two things make this harder to check than it should be. Alcoholic drinks above 1.2% ABV are not legally required to display nutritional information in the UK, and research by the Portman Group found that fewer than half do so voluntarily. So for a lot of cider, the sugar content simply isn't printed anywhere.

The consequence is predictable. A Royal Society for Public Health survey found that more than 60% of people either didn't know or underestimated the calories in a pint of lager. Cider, which carries no such reputation for being calorific, is unlikely to fare better.

Isn't dry cider the answer, then?

Partly, and it's worth understanding why it isn't a complete answer.

A cider that ferments all the way through has very little residual sugar, which is good. But complete fermentation also converts more of that sugar into alcohol, which pushes the ABV up. And alcohol carries 7 calories per gram, close to fat at 9 and well ahead of carbohydrate at 4, as the NHS sets out.

So the sugar you save on one side comes back as alcohol on the other. That's why traditional dry ciders at 6 or 7% aren't the light option people assume, and why the genuinely lower-calorie ciders tend to be the weaker ones rather than the driest ones.

It's the same trade-off that runs through every alcoholic drink. Strength and sweetness are the two levers, and pulling one usually moves the other.

A note on serving sizes

Cider is usually sold in 500ml bottles, beer in 330ml or 440ml cans, and wine in 125ml or 175ml glasses. That makes direct comparison harder than it looks, and it's the single most common way calorie comparisons get quietly rigged.

A 500ml bottle of cider against a 330ml bottle of lager is a 50% volume difference before either has been opened. It will always favour the beer, and it tells you nothing useful.

The tables above use the pint as the common measure for cider and beer, because that's how both are actually drunk in a pub. If you're comparing at home, the honest approach is per 100ml, or per serving as you'll genuinely pour it. Not per whatever size makes the answer come out the way you'd like.

Cutting back without giving up

Three things that work, none of which require drinking less:

• Switch from fruit to dry. Moving from a fruit cider to a dry one saves in the region of 100 to 130 calories a pint, and considerably more sugar.
• Drop the strength. Since alcohol drives most of the calorie count, going from a 5% drink to a 3.4% one saves more than most recipe changes ever will.
• Read the can. Where nutritional information is printed, it's usually per 100ml rather than per bottle, so multiply by five for a 500ml serving. The number is often larger than expected.

Where the calories actually come from

Worth being clear about the mechanism, because it applies to everything on a bar.

Alcohol is 7 calories per gram and brings no nutritional value with it, which is why Drinkaware describes them as empty calories. Sugar is 4 calories per gram and adds on top. There's no fat and negligible protein in cider or beer, so those two account for essentially the whole number.

Drinkaware also estimates that for adults who drink regularly, nearly 9% of their daily calorie intake comes from alcohol. For anyone getting through a few bottles of fruit cider on a Saturday, that share will be considerably higher.

We've gone into this in more depth elsewhere if you want the full picture: calories in a pint of beer, calories in a glass of wine, and a direct wine versus beer comparison.

What to drink instead

We should say plainly that we don't sell cider. So this isn't us pointing you at our own cider, because there isn't one.

What we do stock is beer and wine built the other way round: fermented out fully so there's little sugar left, and then left at full strength rather than sweetened back up.

If you drink cider for the crispness and the cold-glass refreshment, a dry white is closer than you'd think. TRACES Sauvignon Blanc is 78 calories per 125ml at 11% ABV with 0g sugar, and Ancora Pinot Grigio is 76 calories at the same strength.

If you drink cider because it's a long, cold drink in a pint glass, low carb lager is the closer swap. Tennents Light is 84 calories a can at 3.4% ABV with 0.8g of carbs, and The Löwecal Lager is 88 calories at 4.2% with no carbohydrate at all.

If you drink fruit cider for the sweetness, we'd be honest and say nothing we sell replicates that. Everything in our range is dry. A sparkling wine like TRACES Prosecco at 78 calories gives you the fruit character and the fizz without the sugar, but it isn't strawberry and lime and we won't pretend it is.

Common questions

Which cider has the fewest calories? Among the mainstream brands, the dry originals rather than the fruit versions. Strongbow Original at roughly 175 per 500ml is the lightest of the four compared above. Lower-alcohol ciders will generally come in below that again.

Is cider healthier than beer? Neither is a health food. Dry cider and lager are broadly comparable on calories, while fruit cider carries considerably more sugar than either.

Does cider have more sugar than beer? Fruit cider, yes, by a wide margin. Beer's carbohydrate comes from grain and is largely not sugar, whereas a back-sweetened cider carries sugar added after fermentation.

Is cider gluten free? Cider is made from apples, so it doesn't contain gluten from the outset, though some producers add barley-derived ingredients. Check the label if you're coeliac. Our gluten-free beer is tested and labelled as such.

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Brand figures are approximate and taken from published information, which producers do reformulate. Please drink responsibly. UK guidance is no more than 14 units a week, spread across three or more days, with several drink-free days.

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