Bartending Service + Shopping List

That’s pretty much how ours works. We pay the bartenders per hour and then a flat fee per person that includes ice, cups, napkins, garnishes, and mixers. We can have pretty much whatever alcohol we want, and they’ll help tell us what to buy, but we are responsible for buying it all. The Bartending service will also go to the store to pick up the alcohol and deliver it to the venue for an additional fee after we purchase it. We’re doing a selection of soda, wine, and beer plus two signature cocktails.

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Thank you so much for responding! If you don't mind me asking, around how much was your shopping list? I was also thinking of only doing two cocktails and the other drinks you mentioned so I feel like were around the same boat! lol

Normally buying your own beverages is the cheapest option and $500 for all that is included sounds pretty reasonable to me. With buying your own, you have more control of staying within your budget since you can get alcohol that you see on sale or pick something that's not top shelf.

I would agree the list and price would completely depend on what you want. Do you want long islands with a ton of different alcohol or sangria which normally has a bunch of fruit which can get pricey, or do you want Jack and coke which is relatively inexpensive?

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That's so true about the control thing! I was thinking about it that way too. Maybe even sticking to 4 drinks where two use the same alcohol or something like that. Thank you so much for your insight!

View Quoted Comment We actually don’t have a shopping list yet, our wedding is at the end of September so that detail hasn’t come up yet in the planning process. We’re inviting about 100 but assuming that around 75-80 will attend, around 3/4 of which will drink. So I’m hoping it’s not too crazy of a list lol! We’re thinking of very simple cocktails (rum & coke plus a vodka cranberry) to avoid having to buy a bunch of complicated ingredients (we would only have to buy the rum and the vodka, the coke and cranberry would be included in the mixer package) and I may consider getting some whiskey because I have a lot of whiskey drinkers on the guest list! But we’ll discuss in more detail with the bartending company as we get closer!

As PPs have said, that sounds reasonable! And about the same as what we did for our wedding. We decided to go with only beer/ wine/ hard cider (because I love cider), and the bartender helped us figure out amounts. We did tweak the amounts based on what we knew about our guests (and what we would drink if there was some leftover 😆). We purchased the alcohol from total wine, and also purchased the glasses and ice. Overall we spent about $1000 on alcohol for 100 guests, and were able to return the unopened wine