Any drink into grams of pure alcohol, and from there into every national standard at once — because the standards disagree, and that disagreement is the thing worth seeing.
Calculator
Pours:
568 mL at 4% ABV
17.93 g of pure alcohol
22.72 mL of ethanol · 2.27 units in United Kingdom
The same drink, counted in five countries
One serving, five national standards
Country
One "drink" is
This serving is
Local term
United Kingdom
7.89 g
2.27
unit
Australia & New Zealand
10.00 g
1.79
standard drink
Much of continental Europe
10.00 g
1.79
standard unit
Canada
13.46 g
1.33
standard drink
United States
14.00 g
1.28
standard drink
India
—
—
no defined standard
The spread is the point. A United States standard drink holds 1.77 times the alcohol of a United Kingdom unit, so “two drinks” is very nearly two different quantities depending on which side of an ocean it is said on. India is in the table because it belongs there: no national standard drink is defined, so there is no honest number to print.
By volume against by weight
Alcohol by volume, as labelled4.00%what ABV on the bottle means
Alcohol by weight3.16%the same drink, measured by mass
US proof8.0exactly twice the ABV, by definition
Ethanol is lighter than water — 0.78924 g per millilitre at 20 °C — so a percentage by volume is always a smaller percentage by weight. The gap is 27%, which is why US beer labelled by weight in some states looked weaker than identical beer labelled by volume elsewhere. The two numbers describe the same beer.
What a real pour actually contains
Servings as poured, not as idealised
Serving
Pure alcohol
UK units
US drinks
UK pint of 4% lager
17.9 g
2.27
1.28
UK pint of 5.2% craft
23.3 g
2.95
1.67
US 12 oz can of 5% beer
14.0 g
1.78
1.00
US 16 oz pint of 6.5% IPA
24.3 g
3.07
1.73
Small glass of wine, 125 mL at 12%
11.8 g
1.50
0.85
Large glass of wine, 250 mL at 13%
25.7 g
3.25
1.83
Bottle of wine, 750 mL at 13%
77.0 g
9.75
5.50
UK single measure, 25 mL at 40%
7.9 g
1.00
0.56
US shot, 44 mL at 40%
13.9 g
1.76
0.99
Indian large peg, 60 mL at 42.8%
20.3 g
2.57
1.45
Two rows are worth sitting with. A large 250 mL glass of wine is over three UK units on its own — more than a pint of ordinary lager — and a bottle shared between two people is close to five each. The gap between a “standard drink” and a poured one is where most quiet under-counting happens.
Against United Kingdom’s own guidance
Weekly low-risk figure14 units110 g of alcohol
This serving, as a share of it16.2%of one week’s figure
The UK defines its unit by VOLUME — 10 mL of pure ethanol — which is the only major standard that does. Guidance is 14 units a week for everyone, spread over three or more days.
Guidance is not comparable across borders even after converting the units, because the countries are answering different questions — a weekly budget, a daily ceiling, or a continuum of risk. Converting 14 UK units into grams tells you how much alcohol that is; it does not tell you what any other country would advise.
What this will not tell you
Blood alcohol concentration is not calculated here, at all. It is not a unit conversion. It depends on body water and composition, sex, whether and what you have eaten, how long ago each drink was, and an elimination rate that varies substantially between people and within one person from day to day. Every published formula is an estimate with error bars wide enough to straddle a legal limit, and the consequences of a wrong answer are not the kind a converter should be handing out. If the question is whether it is legal or safe to drive, the answer this page gives is: do not, and do not use any calculator to decide.
What this converter covers
UK units, US, Canadian, Australian and continental standard drinks, grams and millilitres of ethanol, ABV against ABW, and real pour sizes.
Any volume and strength into grams and millilitres of pure alcohol
UK units and US, Canadian, Australian and European standard drinks, side by side
Alcohol by volume against alcohol by weight, and US proof
Real poured servings rather than idealised ones
Countries with no defined standard drink, named as such
Five standards at once Volume vs mass No blood-alcohol estimate Units · drinks · grams
Free, no signup — exact by definition, not an estimate.
Updated 8 September 2026
At a glance
Formula shown
ethanol mL = volume × ABV ÷ 100 · grams = mL × 0.78924 · drinks = grams ÷ the local standard
Scenario support
A UK pint of 4% is 2.27 UK units but only 1.28 US drinks · a 250 mL glass of 13% wine is 3.25 UK units
Educational estimate
Planning support from the values you enter — not professional advice.
A drink is not a unit
“Two drinks” sounds like a quantity. It is not one — it is a quantity plus an unstated country.
What one “drink” means, by country
Country
Pure alcohol
Called a
United Kingdom
7.89 g (10 mL)
unit
Australia & New Zealand
10 g
standard drink
Continental Europe
10 g, commonly
standard unit
Canada
13.46 g (17.05 mL)
standard drink
United States
14 g
standard drink
India
none defined
—
The extremes are 7.89 g and 14 g, a ratio of 1.77. Somebody reporting “fourteen drinks a week” is describing 110 g of alcohol in London and 196 g in Chicago — near enough double, in the same sentence, with the same words.
India is in that table on purpose. There is no nationally defined standard drink; guidance and labelling vary by state and several states prohibit sale entirely. Printing a number for it would be inventing one, so this page prints the absence instead.
The practical consequence is that any advice given in drinks needs its country attached before it means anything, and any comparison between two countries has to go through grams of pure alcohol first. That is exactly what the WHO does with national consumption data, and it is what the calculator above does with a glass.
Volume or mass, and why it matters
There is a second, quieter split running through that table: the standards are not even measuring the same kind of thing.
The UK unit is a volume— exactly 10 millilitres of pure ethanol. Canada’s is a volume too, 17.05 mL. Everyone else defines a mass: 10 grams in Australia and most of Europe, 14 grams in the United States.
Because ethanol is lighter than water, the two definitions do not line up. Ten millilitres of ethanol weighs 7.89 g, so a UK unit is noticeably smaller than the 10-gram continental one despite both being written as ten of something.
This is why the UK arithmetic is so unusually clean. Units equal volume in millilitres times ABV, divided by 1000 — a 750 mL bottle of 12% wine is exactly 9 units, with no density anywhere in it. Every mass-based standard has to carry the 0.78924 g/mL, and rounds somewhere as a result.
It also explains a small oddity in the published figures. Canada states its drink as both 17.05 mL and 13.45 g, which are consistent at a density of 0.789 rather than 0.78924 — a rounding, not an error, and the sort of thing that makes two official sources disagree in the third decimal place.
ABV, ABW and proof
The number on the label is alcohol by volume. It is the fraction of the liquid that is ethanol, measured as liquid.
Alcohol by weight is the same drink weighed instead, and it is always a smaller number — 27% smaller, since dividing by 0.78924 is multiplying by 1.267. A 5% ABV beer is 3.95% ABW.
For most of the twentieth century some US states required beer to be labelled by weight, which produced the durable belief that beer sold in those states was weaker. A 3.2% ABW beer is 4.05% ABV — an ordinary lager, differently described.
US proof is the easy one: exactly twice the ABV, by definition, so 40% ABV is 80 proof. The historical British proof system was not twice anything — 100 British proof was about 57.15% ABV, defined by whether a gunpowder-and-spirit mixture would still ignite — and since it has not been in legal use since 1980 this page does not offer it, rather than offering a conversion between two things called proof that were never the same scale.
The pour is not the standard
Standard drinks are defined so that a beer, a glass of wine and a measure of spirits each contain about the same alcohol. Real servings are not poured to that definition.
The US standard drink assumes a 12 oz beer at 5%, a 5 oz glass of wine at 12%, and a 1.5 oz shot at 40%. Each holds roughly 14 g, and the equivalence is genuine — as long as those are the sizes and strengths in front of you.
They frequently are not. A 16 oz American pint of a 6.5% IPA holds about 1.7 standard drinks. A large 250 mL glass of 13% wine is 3.25 UK units, more than a pint of ordinary lager. And a UK pub pint of a 5.2% craft beer is close to 3 units rather than the 2 that a “pint” suggests.
None of this is a trick of arithmetic; it is that both halves of the calculation have drifted. Beer strengths have risen and wine glasses have grown, while the mental model of “a pint” and “a glass” stayed where it was. The serving table above uses sizes as actually poured, which is the only version of the question that gets used in practice.
Blood alcohol is not here
The most common thing people want from a page like this is a blood alcohol figure, and it is the one thing this page will not do.
The reason is not squeamishness. It is that blood alcohol is not a unit conversion. It depends on total body water, which varies with sex, body composition and age; on whether and what you have eaten, which changes absorption by hours; on how long ago each individual drink was, since elimination runs continuously; and on a personal elimination rate that differs between people and within the same person from one day to the next.
Every published formula — Widmark and its descendants — is a population estimate, and the error bars on it are wide enough to straddle a legal limit in either direction. A calculator that returns 0.07% when the honest answer is “between 0.04 and 0.10, and it depends” is not being helpful; it is lending a spurious precision to a decision with legal and physical consequences.
So the engine behind this page refuses it explicitly rather than by omission, and the automated tests assert that the refusal is still there. If the question is whether it is safe or legal to drive, the answer here is: do not, and do not let any calculator tell you otherwise.
What this page can do is tell you how much alcohol was actually in what you drank, in a unit that means the same thing everywhere. That is a smaller question, and it is one that can be answered honestly.
Related calculators
Other volume, mass and concentration tools:
VolumeLitres, gallons, pints and cubic units — with US and imperial named apart, because a UK gallon is 20% larger than a US one.
WeightKilograms, pounds, ounces, stone and tonnes, listing the short, long and metric ton separately — three masses, one word.
Densitykg/m³, lb/ft³, lb/in³ and lb/gal, with specific gravity against any water reference and the API scale that runs backwards.
CookingCups, spoons and sticks to grams for 16 ingredients — with all five cups, the 20 mL Australian tablespoon, and flour as a range.
Oven TemperatureGas marks, °C, °F and fan settings — asking which oven the recipe meant, since the 20 °C offset goes both ways.
Moles to GramsGrams, moles, molarity, molality and normality — asking for the molar mass and the density, because neither conversion exists without them.
Each national figure here comes from that country’s own health authority rather than from a secondary summary, because the differences between them are exactly what a secondary summary tends to smooth away. The WHO reference is the one that explains why comparisons have to be done in grams at all.
Alcohol consumption: advice on low risk drinkingUK Department of Health and Social Care · verified 2026-09-08 · The UK unit defined as 10 mL of pure ethanol — a volume rather than a mass, uniquely among the major standards — and the Chief Medical Officers’ guideline of 14 units a week for both men and women, spread over three or more days
What is a standard drink?National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, NIH · verified 2026-09-08 · The US standard drink of 14 grams — 0.6 fluid ounces — of pure alcohol, and the equivalences behind the 12 oz beer, 5 oz wine and 1.5 oz spirits servings that are built to contain it
Canada’s Guidance on Alcohol and HealthCanadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction · verified 2026-09-08 · The Canadian standard drink of 17.05 mL of pure ethanol, and the 2023 revision that replaced a weekly limit with a continuum of risk in which two drinks a week is described as low
Alcohol — health topicsWorld Health Organization · verified 2026-09-08 · The 10-gram figure used for international comparison, and the point that national standard drinks vary widely enough that consumption data has to be converted to grams of pure alcohol before any two countries can be compared
Conversion note
This is a unit converter, not health advice and not a safety tool. It reports how much pure alcohol is in a drink and how that maps onto different countries' counting conventions — nothing more. It does not and will not estimate blood alcohol concentration, intoxication, impairment, or fitness to drive or operate anything, because those depend on individual physiology, timing and circumstances that no converter has access to, and because being wrong about them has consequences a calculator should not risk. National drinking guidelines are set by public health bodies for populations, are revised over time, and differ in kind as well as in number; the figures here are as published at the date shown and should be checked against the current guidance where you live. Alcohol carries health risks at every level of consumption and interacts with many medicines and conditions. Anyone with questions about their own drinking, their health, or medication should speak to a doctor, a pharmacist or a local alcohol support service rather than relying on any calculator, this one included.
Published the Alcohol Units Converter: any serving size and strength into millilitres and grams of pure ethanol, and from there into five national standards at once.
Reports every standard side by side rather than picking one, because the disagreement between them is the finding: a UK unit holds 7.89 g of alcohol and a US standard drink holds 14 g, a ratio of 1.77, so 'fourteen drinks a week' is 110 g in London and 196 g in Chicago.
Records the second split running through the same table: the UK and Canada define their drink by VOLUME while Australia, continental Europe and the United States define theirs by MASS, which is why 10 mL and 10 g are not the same unit.
Lists India as having no nationally defined standard drink and prints the absence rather than inventing a figure, since guidance and labelling vary by state and several states prohibit sale entirely.
Separates alcohol by volume from alcohol by weight -- 27 per cent apart, because ethanol is 0.78924 g/mL -- and explains the durable belief that US beer labelled by weight was weaker than identical beer labelled by volume.
Gives US proof as exactly twice ABV and declines to offer the historical British proof scale, which was about 57.15% ABV at 100 proof and has not been in legal use since 1980.
Uses servings as actually poured rather than as idealised, so a 250 mL glass of 13% wine shows as 3.25 UK units -- more than a pint of ordinary lager -- and a 16 oz American pint of 6.5% IPA shows as 1.7 US standard drinks.
REFUSES to estimate blood alcohol concentration, in the engine and in words, because it depends on body water, sex, food, elapsed time and an individual elimination rate, and every published formula carries error bars wide enough to straddle a legal limit.
Verified by 99 automated cases, asserting that the national standards genuinely differ by a factor of 1.77, that the UK unit is exactly 10 mL while the Australian one is exactly 10 g, that ABV and ABW round-trip through the ethanol density, that a smaller standard always yields a larger drink count, and that no blood-alcohol estimator is exported under any name.
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