How to log alcohol in Makuro (and why beer has no nutrition label)

Alcohol is exempt from nutrition labeling in nearly every country. The 500 ml can in your hand tells you its alcohol percentage — never its calories. And the spread is too wide to guess: a 5% lemon sour and a 9% Strong-style chūhai in the same can differ by more than 100 kcal.

The good news: the ABV printed on the can is all you need. Ethanol has a fixed density (0.789 g/ml) and fixed energy (~7 kcal per gram), so volume × ABV computes the alcohol calories exactly — no database entry required. That’s what Makuro’s drink calculator does.

Logging a drink

1. Tap the wineglass in the quick-add bar (it’s next to search, photo, and barcode — available on every screen).
2. Pick your drink. The presets are built for how East and Southeast Asia actually drinks: beer, happōshū, chūhai and Strong-style cans, highball, sake, shochu, soju, makgeolli, umeshu, baijiu — plus wine, whisky, and craft beer. Each one seeds a typical ABV.
3. Pick the serving. Real vessels, not abstractions: a 350 or 500 ml can, a 中ジョッキ, one gō (180 ml) of sake, a 50 ml soju glass or the whole 360 ml bottle, a single or double of whisky.
4. Adjust if the label disagrees. Your beer says 5.5%? Type it. The calories, alcohol grams, and carbs update live.
5. Tap Log. It lands in your diary like any other entry — counted in your calorie ring, reflected in your adaptive expenditure, synced to Apple Health if you’ve turned that on.

Carbs are pre-filled from typical values for the style (a dry highball is zero; umeshu is very much not) and stay editable — for a sweet cocktail, bump them up.

Weekly tracking

Once you’ve logged a drink, a Drinks card appears on your Today screen: standard drinks this week, with an eight-week history behind it. You can set your own weekly ceiling — say, 10 drinks — and watch the week against it.

A “standard drink” is defined per country (20 g of pure alcohol in Japan, 14 g in the US, 10 g in Australia, 8 g per UK unit), and Makuro uses your region’s definition automatically. If you’ve enabled Apple Health sync, each logged drink is also written to Health’s Alcohol Consumption metric.

Why bother logging drinks at all?

Because drinking days are the days most people stop logging — and skipped days are the ones that quietly corrupt an adaptive calorie target. Makuro measures your energy expenditure from your logged intake and your weight trend; a Friday that was actually 800 kcal of beer but logged as nothing pushes that measurement off. Making drinks take five seconds to log is how the number stays honest. (The same logic drives our methodology generally: measure, don’t guess.)

One more honest note: alcohol calories carry no protein, fat, or carbs — so a logged beer showing “0P 0F” with 140 kcal isn’t a bug. That’s what beer is. Makuro shows the alcohol grams right on the diary row so the calories are never mysterious.