Full flavor, full calorie … mmmmm beer
My mom and I enjoyed Allagash White Ale at The Trappist in downtown Oakland in July.
I used to hate the taste of beer. Probably because it was a Coors or something.
And I still remember someone telling me that eventually I would get used to the taste and actually like beer.
When I was in college my friend Robert got me into microbrews. Many nights after our shift at the Arizona Daily Wildcat a group of us would go out for beers.
That’s when I really got into trying a variety of beers and what I would refer to as good beer. (I was also drinking a good deal of gin and tonic as well.)
Curt is a beer drinker. So when we first started dating I had my fair share of beer and that continued.
We have gone on vacation over beer: Oktoberfest in Munich; Newcastle, England–OK, that was about football, but I love Newcastle Brown Ale; Prague, London, Barcelona, Dublin–damn good places to drink beer (and eat some good food as well).
In my quest to lose weight and keep it off I have experimented with the light beer imbibing. Hey, I can have “insert number here” of light beers vs. “not as high number here” of regular beers.
But what I recently decided, I would rather have fewer beers and actually enjoy a good-tasting beer.
Since I brought up Newcastle, let’s look at some nutritional information for a 12-ounce beer: Calories: 138; Carbs: 12.8; Alcohol Percentage: 4.7. (All nutritional beer information comes from Fit Sugar.)
I used to regularly drink Corona Light. So let’s look at Corona: Calories: 148; Carbs: 14; Alcohol Percentage: 4.6. And Corona Light: Calories: 99; Carbs: 5; Alcohol Percentage: 3.2
Doing a quick look at the beers listed on Fit Sugar, the calorie difference between a regular beer and its light equivalent is about 40-50.
So yes, light beer has fewer calories and carbs than regular. And in my experience, light beer doesn’t have as much flavor as a regular beer.
And for someone who likes to eat and drink I am gonna go for flavor in my beer over a lot less flavor in my beer and just a few less calories. (I’m finding that having less of something that tastes great is way better than having more of something that doesn’t taste so great–such as fat free Ranch dressing vs. regular Ranch dressing.)