Beer and wine vs full bar!

We have a full bar with our venue and we have wine

We are doing beer and wine with mimosas and 1 signature drink. My reception starts at noon and I think the drinks are appropriate for the time of day. I also am saving lots of money on full bar!

It primarily depends on what you can afford and what packages your venue offers. If beer and wine come out significantly cheaper, there's nothing wrong with it.

We had full open bar. I like having options.

We are having full open bar. We are having an evening wedding so from 5pm-6pm will be cocktail hour (2 signature drinks) and then 6-10 is open bar. We will have liquor, beer, wine, soft drinks, and water. FH and I love to drink and I agree with what your FH said with "we shouldn't have to worry about grown adults drinking", very true indeed!

Edited: A family friend's wedding was last weekend and besides soft drinks and water all she had was miller light and bud light. No liquor, no wine, and no other type of beer. If money is an issue stick with beer and wine.

Yay Cassidy for calling it pop! You must be a midwesterner?! My friends still make fun of me when I call it pop, although I will admit the more time I spend away from the midwest, the more I start calling it soda.

But I digress... I think if you have room in your budget, do the full bar. But you also know your guests better. In our crowd, people are more likely to drink a cocktail than beer/wine, so full bar was the only way to go for us. But if money is a concern, or you just don't have liquor drinkers, I think having a signature cocktail with beer and wine is good. I've yet to go to a wedding that had some sort of free alcohol where people complained about the type. :-)

FH & I were talking about this yesterday. We both think having beer & wine is perfectly fine, maybe we'll do a signature drink, maybe not. FMIL wants liquor because she is VERY concerned about how things appear to others. However, she and FFIL are not paying for anything (there's a drama filled back story there) so FH & I decided that we're just going to do what we want to do. We can definitely afford beer and wine and having a full open bar might break the budget. I say go with what you can afford! Guests should be grateful to have ANY alcohol that they don't have to pay for!

I'm actually from San Jose, CA, but my dad and his family are from Michigan. I lived there for a year and LOVED it.

I normally say soda, but I'm starting to not like that word. I don't even drink it. I'm all about water and tea.

Serina, I think it is a regional thing (and of course a budget thing!!) In AZ, it is not uncommon to have the bar open for a set amount of time and then have it go to cash. But in some circles, its not cool!

We originally were going to do an open bar with everything--but we just don't want to spend that much. So we are also doing beer/wine/soda but will have a few VIP's that can have whatever they want. It was a huge savings for us. With our venue, if they want something that we aren't offering, they can pay. But most of our guests have no problems with wine or beer!

We are doing an open full bar (sort of) - beer keg, wine, champagne, Vodka, Crown, Jack, Rum. No Gin or Scotch, because our friends don't drink either. We get to choose our own cause our venue allows us to bring it.

I also travel internationally so I bring back at least 2 bottles each trip (Canada I can bring back more than 2) to take advantage of the duty free shops (Absolut Vodka here =$32, duty free = $19!) Our venue also provides a margarita machine - so we are trying to figure out if we will be doing margaritas, frozen sangria or a custom frozen wedding drink!

We are having a Saturday evening wedding with about 100 guests.

If your afraid people will get out of hand then dont do hard liquor...we are doing beer and wine....if they dont like it they can get drunk somewhere else...i doubt anyone would complain

If your afraid people will get out of hand then dont do hard liquor...we are doing beer and wine....if they dont like it they can get drunk somewhere else...i doubt anyone would complain

@ Janet people can get drunk off of just wine or beer. Trust me I enjoyed my friend's open bar at his wedding a few weeks ago and I only drank wine.

We had a fully open bar, but that is because we were allowed to bring in our own liquor, so definitely cuts down on the cost. Ours was open for cocktail, closed down during dinner and then opened up afterwards for dancing and partying until we closed it down at 2am.

I'm having beer and wine and a signature drink.... I like wine better and so do a lot of people we are inviting it's up to you and what you think your guest would prefer.

I have some good tips here, thins ladies

Lol when I hear "soda" it makes me think of something fancy, like seltzer. Love the midwest!

We chose our venue in part b/c we could supply our own alcohol. We paid around $1300 for the booze, ice and mixers to fuel an 8.5 hour open bar. It's not like we offered every booze selection under the sun, but we had several varieties of red, white and sparkling wine, 4 kinds of beer, 2 premium whiskeys, premium gin, premium vodka, and Hennessy. If we had purchased that retail through an onsite caterer it would have been easily a third of our wedding budget!!!

Serve whatever you can afford. Beer and wine is great.

Up until the venue said it was a no go any longer, we were doing just beer and wine with lots of non-alcoholic drinks.

I can't do beer/wine only because I hate BOTH of those options and I want to have a few drinks at my own wedding!!

We were on the fence about this one too. For the longest time, we were planning on beer and wine only. Once we got our RSVPs in and found out we had less guests coming than expected, we scrounged up the money to pay for an open bar. BEST DECISION EVER. Our reception was a blast and people loved getting free drinks. No one got crazy drunk or out of hand. We just partied the entire time. I don't think people would have let loose and danced as much if we just did beer and wine. Our reception probably would have ended a little earlier.

We are doing beer, wine, champagne and soft drinks.

I think it's rude to supply one type of alcohol, but not another. I only cook with wine n beer, my drink of choice is whiskey straight up! I'm having a full open bar with a 3k total wedding budget, but I'm not paying for a venue. If I weren't able to pay for open bar, I would still have one and give everyone a few cute designed tickets per person and they could pay for their wine, beer or hard booze after that.