Just beer and wine for 60 drinkers

How long is your reception?

I believe the calculation is 2 drinks during cocktail hour, and one drink per hour for every hour after that. I hope this helps!

Reception plus cocktail hour is about 5 hours, but we will also have champagne at each table for the toasting, and coffee/later snack as well.

I don't know how many drinks you can get out of a bottle of wine.

There are some calculators out there. Not sure how reliable they are but better than guessing randomly.

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

http://www.totalwine.com/party-planning

You need to plan on at least 6 drinks per person...with a surplus of everything, so that your guests don't run out of certain things. Generally you can get 4ish glasses out of a bottle of wine.

I would do 2 white wines (one dry, one sweeter) and 2 red wines (one dry one sweet) and 3-4 beer options.

Your champagne toast does not count towards that 6 drinks per person rule of thumb.

ETA: for my 85 guests, I had roughly 250 beers, 6 or 7 cases of wine, and 5 handles of vodka(for Moscow mules). We ended up with about 1 case of wine left, one handle of vodka and a handful of beer. My crew blew way past that rule of 2 during cocktails and one for each additional hour.

If you do full pours, a wine bottle is typically 4 glasses of wine, Champagne bottles typically pour 7 flutes.

I recommend reaching out to a local brewery and see if they sell 20L/Sixtels/Pony kegs which pour around 40 pints each. Usually this is a cheaper route than bottles, and easier cleanup. I would recommend a light beer (Lager or Pilsner) and either an IPA or Amber. Usually stouts go over better in the colder months. Be sure to pay attention to beers "ABV" which is the alcohol content... I usually steer people into the lower ABVs for weddings and events.

JSARGE, thanks for this advise. Our venue is a Farmers Market and everyone is local so they'll all need to be driving after. I would hate for people to be over the limit driving home, especially in Detroit.

Mariah S. I was actually considering a keg as well. Good to know.

@Molly, the wine industry standard is a five ounce pour, which means that there would be five glasses of wine in a 750ml bottle.

For 60 guests, it will depend how many are beer drinkers and how many are wine drinkers. It would not be out of the realm of possibility that each wine drinker will consume one bottle of wine, each, over the course of the evening.

Kathy, half of the guests are my FH's family and I honestly have no idea how many wine/beer drinkers we would have.

For reference, we had 120 guests, 7 cases of wine, and three kegs (2 1/2bbl and 1 1/4bbl) for a 5 hour reception.

We had half a keg and a case of red wine left over after.

As a guest, I'd have more than one glass of wine an hour.

I think the one per hour is a good rule, but that's just for me and most of my crowd. We may over estimate a bit to make sure we don't run out.

Not knowing who drinks what does make it a bit more difficult to estimate, but not impossible.

For wine, with 60 people, I would recommend that you have two cases of white and two cases of red. You may end up with some left over.

For my daughters wedding, we did four cases of each, plus two cases of sparkling wine. Since I am in the business, I supplied all of the wine.

There were 134 guests. We blew through all of it and I had to buy additional wine from the venue. Fortunately, one of my friends was the GM of the hotels restaurant and he was a guest at the reception. He did not upcharge me for the additional wine. Yea!