Here's How Many Pints Of Beer Are In A Standard Keg

In the world of beer, the keg connects brewers — everyone from macro breweries to your friend who brews in his basement — to the people who like to drink beer. Beer kegs come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. They range in size from small, like the Heineken mini keg you might get for an evening with friends, to quarter-barrel kegs, the kind you might have seen spewing frothy Natty Light at college house parties. You can rent them for any occasion, and sometimes you don't even have to fill them with beer; they can also hold soda and cider if you prefer.

The industry standard keg, sometimes called a full keg, stores, transports, and dispenses beer to the masses at bars, restaurants, and sporting events. If you're hosting a party, running a bar, or just curious about how much beer you can get from a standard keg, well, it holds a lot of beer — approximately 124 pints. 

A standard keg, also called a half-barrel, is one of the largest kegs available. A good keg supplier should be able to tell you how many beers you actually get out of a keg, but it's a behemoth. Put in more familiar terms, it holds about 165 12-ounce bottles of beer or around 27 six-packs. Needless to say, if you're not a college frat house or a caterer, you may never have a need for one of these larger kegs.

A few kegs have more manageable capacities, but their shapes vary, like the quarter barrel keg and the slim quarter keg — the former is squat and stocky, the latter taller and skinny. Both are ideal for small to medium-sized parties; they both hold 62 pints, which is a decent amount of beer for a crowd. For intimate gatherings, a mini keg, also called a bubba keg, might be more your speed. These hold ten pints, so it'll be good to have a few friends over for dinner or a barbecue.