How Many Beers Are Typically In A Pitcher?

When you ask for "a beer" at a bar, usually you'll get a pint glass. At bars with lots of craft beers (versus simple domestic beers), you'll see more variety in size, such as smaller chalices for heavy beers. On occasion, you might end up staring down a giant pitcher of beer. Maybe somebody — and maybe that somebody was you — ordered it for the table, and even if you've had a few beers already, it's easy to tell that the pitcher towers over the usual kinds of beer glasses. How many beers can you pour out of this pitcher?

A large pitcher is 60 ounces in volume, and a pint glass is 16 ounces, so a pitcher holds 3.75 beers. This means that with three people, you could pour everyone a full glass and still have some leftover. With four people, you'd need to pour slightly less than a full glass to make everyone happy. Some smaller pitchers are only 32 ounces, which gets you two beers. If you consider "a beer" to be a beer bottle, then the average longneck bottle sold in stores is 12 ounces; you could serve five people a bottle's worth of beer from a pitcher.

You typically order a beer pitcher instead of a pint when you're with a group. Much like sangria, a beer pitcher is considered a communal affair and it usually saves you a bit of money: Bars and restaurants like to price pitchers slightly cheaper per-ounce to encourage patrons to make a larger purchase. If you're sure your friends will drink it all, it's often not a bad deal. You'll often see pitchers more often during big holidays like St. Patrick's Day, usually with cheap beer. However, some craft beer bars offer their goods in pitchers too, so you can fill it with anything from a Kölsch to a pilsner.

That said, unlike sangria, beer pitchers aren't always so common. Many bartenders prefer to use the proper, smaller type of glass when serving beers, and they'd raise an eyebrow if you ordered a large pitcher for yourself instead of gradually ordering four beers. If you want a big glass that's reasonably sized for one person, you might order a beer in a stein, those big Oktoberfest mugs with glass handles, and which hold up to 33 ounces (a full liter), which is the size of a small pitcher.