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This is a fab question...fiance and I are in charge of the bar tab. It's a day time wedding with 61 on the guest list (hoping to only have 50 show) and we don't know how much to budget!
I found this online alcohol calculator for weddings. http://www.realsimple.com/holidays-entertaining/weddings/wedding-wine-liquor-calculator-00000000008314/index.html
I'm having a small wedding of 50 or less and it told me to buy 18 bottle of white and red wine each and 100 bottles of beer! My FI and have only planned on buying 6 bottles of wine of red and white, 50 bottles of beer and 5 bottles of champagne.
I have about 100 guests but not all of them drink. So I am thinking 2 cases red, 1 case white, 1 case champagne and 4 cases beer. But I'd like to see if that's good enough.
Ours went through much less than we expected or budgeted for. Our 65 guests had approx 2 drinks per person. Anyone who wanted a drink through out the evening, had one and those who did not had lots of lemonade/water/coffee/tea. I would say we had approximately 20 non-drinkers due to age and choice.
We were charged for the following consumptions (by cup) for a crowd of 270 adult guests:
165 cups white wine
270 cups red wine
100 cups domestic and imported beer
450 cups mixed drinks
288 soda (non alocholic beverage)
needless to say i almost passed out when i saw the bill.
@FinallyGettingMarried: Wow... 3.6 drinks per person, not including non-alcoholic. That sounds like a LOT.
We budgeted for about 6 drinks/person plus a bottle of red and a bottle of white on each table (total of 15 tables). We had 140 guests and were almost bang on. I think it ended up being about 6.4 drinks/person (of course many people had way more, and some didn't have any at all, so it almost evened out).
@FinallyGettingMarried: May I ask, are you friends and family "drinkers". We are expecting about the same amount and I am trying to estimate the alcohol budget. I have some "drinkers" in my group.
We're estimating about 6 drinks per person - some will drink more, some less. But it's a 4 hour reception, so that's a little over one drink per hour, per person.
@bissell: that's good to know! your crowd sounds the most similiar to ours...we anticipate quite a few people will consume an entire bottle of wine by themselves. i think there is a possibility we *might* run out of beer, but i don't think we care enough to buy more. i think we only have a few people who will only drink beer.
i would say out of 270 adult guests -
160 are older adults - not big drinkers, probably 1 cup of soda/ 1 cup of wine
60 not big drinkers - 1 or 2 alcoholic beverage
50 pretty big drinkers - as little as 5 to 10 cups per person.
the 50 guests brought up the average
@blondeebuckeye I'm sure your guests will be grateful for any beverages that are available (especially at no cost to them). I have yet to hear of anyone complain about free booze :) All the best to you!!!
We had 200 guests. The liquor store told us to allow 5 beers 2-3 highballs per person. We bought that much and decided we should probably buy more. We hardly had any left and basically gave people who helped clean up the venue some liquor to take home as a thank you. We also had 2 bottles of homemade personalized wine at each table of 8. Those were well consumed as well!
I'm in the same position. We are trying to decide if we want to do an open bar or cash bar and after reading this I'm thinking a cash bar for sure!
O my, this is the part I'm dreading because it's going to be so expensive lol. I'm glad someone asked this because I've always wondered about exactly what people drink. I would think your estimate sounds right? Maybe 2 kegs of beer because for my second engagement party, we had 30-40 guests and went through one keg in no time lol.
@finallygetting married: If you don't mind me asking, how much was your bill? We are doing an open bar for 200 guests and it's an adult mostly and we have some heavy drinkers. I'm really nervous lol.
Legally, we were supposed to sell our liquor for 2.50 a drink. Good for us, still pretty good for the guests. So with that we broke about even. And you can always return unopened bottles or cases.
We had 100 guests, and in about 5-6 hours we went through:
75 litres of beer (1.5 50 litre kegs)
15 bottles of white
15 bottles of red
(the wine was put on the tables, and I don't think anyone ordered more at the bar, I think they just took it off the tables, though we had more available)
4, 750mL bottles of rye
3, 750mL bottles of vodka
1.5, 750mL bottles of Pimm's liqueur
Also, those calculators grossly overestimate how much mix you need. We had TONS leftover. TONS.
We are having a day wedding as well and about 47 people coming. I was just going to do Mimosa's and Bloody Mary's because its a day wedding?
@blondeeebuckeye: The scary thing to think about is that at my friend's going away party last year, there were probably 10-15 people there and we went through about a case and a half of champagne. I think that says a little more about my friends though and exactly why we picked a place where the alcohol is included in the price!
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For those of you who were able to bring your own booze to the reception, how much booze was actually consumed?
We are having 110 guests and we just bought:
1.5 cases of champagne
3 cases of red wine
2 cases of white wine
1 keg of beer
Our crowd is full of "heavy" drinkers (approximately 10 do not drink at all because of age or they are pregnant..we adjusted this to 100 guests), but this seems like a TON of booze for a 4 hour reception. We used a few drink calculators to get our numbers (evite, realsimple, other random ones).
So...how much booze was actually consumed at your wedding?