Boozing at the Reception

I am struggling with this. We are willing to spend 500-600$ on this but we are not trying to get them drunk. I am doing Moscato, Heineken( or Corona) , 1800 tequila, and maybe Hennessey with the fixings. I was going to do a signature cocktail but..Im thinking not. It's complimentary from us....

You should be following up with anyone who doesn't RSVP to get an accurate guest count. Most articles say to account for 2 drinks pp during cocktail hour and 1 drink pp per hour for every hour after. If you're having a 4 hour reception and have 80 guests, that would be 480 drinks. There are also calculators that you can use to get estimates. Big Red Liquors is the one that I see recommended most often. Of course these are just estimates, this can really be a know your crowd thing. If you know your guests prefer beer over wine or vise versa, change these numbers to accommodate those preferences. You can also ask your bartender for their input.

We plan on stocking our own bar for our wedding of roughly 100 guests! We aren't having liquor at all and we don't plan on providing near enough to allow our guests to get drunk (also a Sunday wedding so most people will have work the next morning anyways). So just 3 types of bottled beer and 2 types of wine (5-6 drinks per bottle I believe).

The articles I've read say you should accommodates 2 drinks per guest during cocktail hour and 1 drink per guest every hour after until the end of the reception. For us that would be roughly 500 drinks, but my dad talked us into only doing about 300 considering a lot of people probably won't drink given it's a Sunday evening and then that leaves too much alcohol left for the heavy drinkers to take advantage of. But that's just the method we're using, hope this helps!

View Quoted Comment Thank you this does help! My family and his are huge drinkers just mostly our friends so I could probably lessen the amount of drinks like you did.

View Quoted Comment How did you find a bartender? I'm having a hard time finding someone

View Quoted Comment I thought about it not being complimentary as well but I think that people may drink less and I was afraid I'd be wasting my money. But only about half of my guests will drink anyways

View Quoted Comment We found ours on Thumbtack