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Comment by flanbiscuit | Hacker News Reader

Does it being a sugar base make the alcohol closer to a rum?

Rum is generally made from fermented molasses, though not always. Sugar base would make it closer to cachaça, a Brazilian liquor.

Being made from sugar, it more completely ferments. Beer has residual short-chain carbohydrates that leave calories and provide body.

It wouldn’t be much like rum unless it were brewed with dark sugar.

> leave calories

Ethanol itself is most of the calories in any alcoholic drink.

For people curious on the breakdown:

A 12 oz can of 5% abv is .6 fluid ounces of ethanol. That's 14 grams, or 98 calories.

A Budweiser has 145 calories, White Claw has 100, Old Chub Scottish ale has 264.

Basically I see the benefit over most craft beer, but over macros it's not that big of a difference.

That is a calorie if the alcohol is burned in a flame. An alcohol calorie isnt a carb calorie.

https://drinks.seriouseats.com/2013/10/cocktail-science-do-a...

https://www.quora.com/Do-calories-in-alcohol-really-exist-If...

I cant find an exact answer, but combining the ideas that: the metabolic pathways for ethanol take precedence over the metabolism of other food components, leading to fat conversion and storage of higher-kcal foods than would be expected if the energy for metabolism was not diverted to the alcohol; the extra energy needed to metabolize alcohol should become a net drain on energy reserves; and alcohol is almost never fully metabolized, but rather excreted as acetic acid - I think it is safe to assume that an ethanol calorie actually provides the body very little energy AND if youre not eating while you are drinking there isnt a way for the body to store the energy as fat for later.

If you add up the average consumption of alcohol for an American in a year, the difference between 100 calories per unit and 145 calories per unit amounts to something like an additional 45-60 minutes of exercise per week to offset. There’s a lot of variables there, so it could potentially be more or less, but it’s non-trivial.

Being low carb is appealing to a lot of people.

To be fair Old Chub is north of 8% abv I do believe.

Though the calorie count is misleading because so little of it is metabolized

Rhum agricole and cachaça are made from sugar-cane juice. That's not as pure as refined sugar, but it makes a much cleaner spirit than molasses.

The bigger difference between White Claw and rum, i would say, is that rum is distilled, whereas White Claw is only fermented. I'm not sure there are any traditional non-distilled drinks made from sugar, and Wikipedia is down so i basically have no way to fake being well-informed as i usually do.

Well, there's Night Train, 17.5% alcohol. It's "flavored fortified wine".

In order to be 'wine' it has to be fermented from fruit juice - not sugar water.

I'm not a liquor expert by any means, but I believe cachaça is made with sugar cane juice and is considered a type of rum. Or maybe a close relative of rum.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cachaça

Not necessarily.

One thing that seems to be often overlooked is that yeast do not simply convert sugar into ethanol. They require nutrients and will produce different compounds(Google tryptophol) if a nutrient runs out and prevents complete metabolism.

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