Open Bar at the reception$?$?

Depends on your venue. Some places charge per person and some will let you do a consumption bar.

We are doing an open bar. Our venue charges a corking fee, but we bring the booze. Will be around $300 for the liquor and another $300 for the corking fee.

Totally depends on your venue. We looked at hotel venues where it would be $66 per person for 4 hours....that would have been more than $5K for us. The venue we ended up with was just a venue so we did a 5-hour premium open bar (grey goose, Tanqueray etc, Blue Moon beer, Kwak beer, wine, champagne etc) for just over $1K.

Our bar is included in our catering fee - we're going with a four hour house brand bar, so combined with the dinner it is $40.95 per person.

We did that, and it came about 1k under our worst estimate. We considered paying per person per hour, but given how many people we had who did not drink or drank very little, it didn't make sense to us. We also had a very small wedding (45 people) so it wasn't difficult to estimate how much we think people are going to drink.

I'm planning to do either a consumption bar or open bar for a few hours. Don't want to break the bank.

Ok open bar for a couple hours...great idea! Never considered that. Now on the other hand please explain what a "consumption bar" is and how that works. Thank you all for your immediate feed back! I should be ashamed of myself as we are getting ready for church we are talking about an open bar...LOL!!!

I had a lunch reception and did a tab bar because per head was as much as the reception itself. Within two hours we were over $1000, I almost died and cut it off. Manager just put up a sign that said cash bar after 2pm.

It's pretty much the norm around where I live to have open bar at a wedding (in NYC area). So our venue offers it anyway. It's included in the price of the dinner per head cost.
A consumption bar is just that - based on how much your guests consume. So it depends on whether or not your guests are heavy drinkers. : )

Host establishes the maximum dollar amount to be spent at an open bar. Bar is closed or converted to cash when limit is reached.

Ok I got it!

Our open bar is included in our catering! 4 hours, closing for the hour for dinner! :-).

Our catering doesn't provide alcohol but they provide the bar set up (actual bar and cocktail mixers etc). We haven't decided exactly what we want to do yet, mainly because our event will be happening on a Saturday afternoon, from 12-4. I personally can't imagine people drinking too much in the afternoon but my FH still thinks it would be nice to have an open bar. I'm thinking I might just make up a ton of my famous Sangria, and then also provide some beer and wine. Soda is provided with the cost of the meal.

We're definately going to have an open bar of some sort. We haven't decided if it will just be beer/wine (for a per person charge) - then consumption to a certain limit for liquor or if we will go with the open liquor (for a per person charge). It will depend on the makeup of the final guest list

We're doing beer and wine only. Not the expensive vintages either. We're still looking at buying a house and paying for school(4/5 years for me and 1 for him). It would be great if we could do it, but we realisticly can't.

An open bar is an absolute must at our wedding. Neither of us our fans of paying for drinks at a wedding (nor would we knock anybody that does it). The bar is one of the most expensive things at our wedding. We are paying for 4 hours (closed during dinner) of top shelf open bar and it's running us slightly less then $2,500 for 130 people. It works out to $17.95 per person which is a friggen steal in my mind!

Were paying between $100-115 pp (haven't decided on menu choices yet) and this includes a 4 hour premium open bar, plated dinner and cake.

It depends on the venue and where you live. We are in the boston area and spent $6000 for the open bar for our 72 guests. For us it ran more than expected at the wedding because we wanted specific brands and even though we got the premium bar we still had to pay extra for that. Not to mention the $2.5 extra per glass for them to decorate the martini glasses with sugar and a strawberry for my martini luge that we had after dinner. We made out better at the rehearsal dinner and after party. Even though we had open bar at those events as well, people didn't drink nearly as much as we expected and the venues didn't nickel and dime us on the extras.

In my area, north NJ, it's almost unheard of to have a cash bar. Consumption bars are tough because it may actually cost you more, and it's really hard to change gears in the middle of a reception; someone is going to get the of the gratis drinks.

Limited bars, however, are popular in some venues, especially those that allow the couple to bring in their own caterer. Wine, beer, sig drink, maybe a prosecco bar, but the same thing all night.

Most of the venues that I am familiar with include the price of an open bar in their packages, but those that don't usually charge 10-20 bucks per adult. In NYC, thats about one martini, lol......(You haven't lived until you've gotten a 40.00 bill for two drinks......)

Full open bar, my guests would be beyond insulted with anything else. We made sure we chose a venue where we could bring our own booze, this immediately eliminated 99% of our options but we found a venue we loved that allowed it and we are spending about $1,200 on booze and we paid a bar tending company about $1k and they will do all of the work and take all of the liability