Calculators
Alcohol units calculator
Pick a cocktail or enter a custom drink's ABV and volume to see UK units, US standard drinks, and what that's roughly equivalent to in wine or beer.
Search for and pick a cocktail to see its alcohol units.
Assumptions used in this calculation
Reference wine strength: 12.5% ABV
Typical still wine strength — used only for the plain-language comparison line, not the units figures themselves.
Reference beer strength: 5% ABV
Typical lager/beer strength — used only for the plain-language comparison line, not the units figures themselves.
How this works
A cocktail almost never contains one drink's worth of alcohol. Three 25ml spirits in a Long Island Iced Tea is four UK units before anything else goes in — around the same as two pints of strong lager — and nothing about the glass tells you that. This converts a recipe into the numbers used by UK and US guidance.
The UK unit formula
One UK unit is 10ml of pure alcohol. Units = volume in millilitres × ABV as a percentage ÷ 1,000. A 25ml measure of a 40% spirit is 25 × 40 ÷ 1,000 = 1 unit, which is where the single-measure convention comes from.
UK guidance is not to regularly drink more than 14 units a week, spread over three or more days. Two cocktails can be a third of that.
US standard drinks are a different number
A US standard drink is 14 grams of pure alcohol, which is about 17.7ml — roughly 1.75 UK units. The same cocktail therefore produces a smaller-sounding number in US terms, which is worth knowing when reading American recipes and guidance.
Why the number surprises people
A cocktail's strength in the glass is lower than the spirit's, because of mixers and dilution — but its total alcohol is fixed by what went in. A long drink can be 8% in the glass and still contain two units, because there is simply more of it.
Dilution changes concentration, not quantity. Shaking a drink for longer does not reduce the units.
A worked example: a Negroni
- 30ml gin at 40%: 30 × 40 ÷ 1,000 = 1.2 units.
- 30ml Campari at 24%: 30 × 24 ÷ 1,000 = 0.72 units.
- 30ml sweet vermouth at 15%: 30 × 15 ÷ 1,000 = 0.45 units.
- Total: about 2.4 UK units, or roughly 1.4 US standard drinks.
- Two Negronis is around a third of the weekly UK guideline.
What it does not account for
- Your actual pour. Free-pouring adds more than most people believe, and a heavy hand can add half a unit a drink.
- Brand ABVs, which vary — vermouths run from 14.5% to 18%, and rums and gins vary more than that.
- How your body processes alcohol, which no calculator can tell you. This is arithmetic on the drink, not advice about you.