How do you figure out how much alcohol you need to buy?

This is a know your crowd situation. We planned for 50 people, bought 3 1/2 cases of wine, 10 bottles champagne, 4 larges cases of beer, and two batches of our signature drink. Our drink was gone at the end of the night, we have 3 bottles of champagne, 2 cases of beer, and 1 1/2 cases of wine left. We way overbought but we mostly bought what we like and would drink after the wedding. I thought our guests that drink would drink more, others I thought would have one or two didn't drink at all. There are website that calculate for you. I found that helpful but rounded up because I will always want too much instead of not enough.

https://www.evite.com/pages/party/drink-calculator

Here is a drink calculator. You put in the number of guests, number of hours, and types of alcohol needed and it will give you a rough estimate of what you need. But as Ivy ORP said, it is a know your crowd type of thing. Our planner suggested to us how much alcohol we should order. We knew we had a large amount of heavy drinkers/partiers on our guest list, so we added on to the alcohol amount she suggested and had very little left over at the end of the night.

We are just having beer and wine. We are expecting 75 guests. 50 of those are likely to drink at least lightly. We ordered a case of white, case of red and we are going to get 15 cases of beer. Also sodas and water.

Hey Crystal!

When it comes to buying alcohol for your wedding, it’s important to think about the guests you are inviting. Are they light of heavy drinkers? How long will your reception last?

How much do you anticipate an average guest drinking in an hour? After you have calculated this amount, I would increase it by 25%, just to be safe.