Looking for a drink calculator for your event’s bar? Check out our advanced Alcohol and Beverage Calculator for the most accurate estimates for alcohol planning and budgeting. It’s a great tool especially when you are supplying your own alcohol for your wedding bar.
While considering your music, decor, and food dishes, your choice of bar service is one of the most important decisions to make. Are you going to stock your own beer, wine, and liquor? Will you provide an open bar or a cash bar? Perhaps you’ll offer an open bar and cash bar hybrid? Or maybe you will keep it simple and allow guests to BYOB? No matter what you decide, alcohol plays a significant role at any wedding.
Wedding Bar Planning
First things first, to make sure you get the right list of drinks, you need to know your guests. This will help you figure out what type of drinks your family and friends would like, in general. Next, plan out your budget and this will include all the overhead costs as well, such as tips, bar service charges, hiring bartenders, and so on.
You should check with your venue whether they charge a corkage fee. Depending on their policy, you can include that in your total alcohol budget. You can definitely hire professional bar service, but to cut down on the costs you can simply DIY at very affordable prices.
Make an estimate of the size of your wedding and split the guest list into alcoholic drinkers for one group and non-alcoholic drinkers and children for the second. Given that you will have a variety of guests, you should also offer a variety of drinks. Again, you can take advantage of our accurate drink calculator to do all of the math for you when it comes to how much beer, wine, liquor, mixers, champagne, soda, and water you’ll need. Consider buying extra booze if you know your people love to party. If you plan to have a signature cocktail on the menu, you need to have enough bottles of the primary spirits and mixes needed to create the delicious masterpiece.
Additionally, don’t forget the traditional toasting and clamoring of guests tapping fluted glasses. Empty glasses need to be filled. You need to consider your champagne needs based on the level of passion your guests may have when it comes to giving a good cheers.
Below is a suggested catalog of liquor bottles you can stock for your big day. But before reading ahead, let’s briefly go through the standard units of measuring for drinks.
Number of drinks per bottle:
- A bottle of wine can fill 5 glasses.
- A bottle of champagne or sparkling wine can fill about 6 glasses.
- A standard 750ml bottle of liquor can make around 17 drinks (@ 1.5 ounces each).
Number of bottles per case:
- 1 case of wine has 12 bottles.
- 1 case of beer or soft drinks has 24 cans or bottles.
Popular Wedding Bar Shopping List
- Beer
- Whiskey/Bourbon
- Gin
- Vodka
- Rum
- Tequila
- Champagne/Sparkling wine
- White wine
- Red wine
- Sweet vermouth
- Dry vermouth
- Scotch
Mixers and Non-Alcoholic Beverages
- Club soda
- Tonic
- Orange juice
- Cranberry juice
- Ginger ale
- Lime juice
- Lemon juice
- Sweet & sour mix
- Simple syrup
- Coke
- Diet coke
- Sprite
- Diet sprite
- Triple sec
- Sparkling water
- Bottled water
Besides beer, wine, and liquor, you can’t forget about the non-alcoholic drinkers and children that will attend your event. For them, make sure to keep a good number of juices, sodas, and other non-alcoholic drinks on hand. Bottled water, ice cubes, and other garnishing items like chocolate sauce, lemons, limes, oranges, herb leaves like mint, are also must haves.
MixologyMost bartenders recommend that you should budget one and a half ounces (or shot) of liquor per mixed drink. In total, you should have roughly 15 standard bottles of liquor. Keep in mind that the more variety you offer, the more bottles you will need. If you are offering a limited selection of mixed drinks or have a signature cocktail, you will need to stock up more on the spirits included in those recipes.
If you aren’t sure what alcohol your guests prefer, you may want to stick to a balanced ratio of spirits, wine, and beer to stay on the safer side no matter what drinks they are more partial to partaking. That means stick to providing about 1/3 or 33.3% of each kind of beverage. Be sure to adjust your ratio if you know what your guests prefer. To make your drink shopping list more accurate, you should consider the total time your bartenders will be staffed. Generally bars are open around 3 to 5 hours per event. Adults at events tend to drink about 2 servings per hour for the first 2 hours, then they slow down to consume only about 1 drink per hour thereafter. For example, if your bar will be open for 4 hours and you have a 100 guests, calculate about 6 (2+2+1+1) servings per head or 600 (6x100) total alcoholic servings for the event.
No matter how well you follow our advice, it would be difficult for you to end up with the exact number of bottles you will need for your wedding reception. But don’t worry, you’ll still do great. To get pretty close to figuring out the perfect amount of alcohol to buy, you’ll need to have a good estimate of how many invited people will attend, how long your open bar will be available, drinking preferences, and the number of children & non-alcoholic drinkers coming. Planning for your wedding is generally a little stressful. Follow our tips and you’ll have one less headache to worry about later.
Don’t forget about the ice!
Browse some of our other articles with helpful wedding ideas:
Tips on How to Avoid Common Wedding Disasters
Does a Bride Need to Wear White to Her Own Wedding?
Alcohol and Beverage Calculator
How to Create, Organize, and Narrow Down a Wedding Guest List
Wedding Guest Count Estimate Calculator