Open bar?

The venue we are planning to get allows us to bring in our own, so that's what we're going to do

This is a concept I have also struggled with... open bar at my venue is quite pricy. I want people to enjoy themselves but I also don’t want people to start misbehaving because it is an open bar. We have a lot of guests that don’t drink or at most would have one drink, so we might not even get our monies worth if we had an open bar. I also cringe at the thought of having people having to pay for a drink and complaining. We have decided to pay up to a certain cash limit. When the limit is reached, we can either turn it into a cash bar or we can increase the limit. I think that is a good compromise.

View Quoted Comment I’m the same way! I was actually surprised so many people are doing open bar. Every wedding I have ever been to was cash bar and I didn’t think anything of it. That’s a good alternative is putting up cash for a limit then opening to a cash bar.

View Quoted Comment It’s so hard to decide and honestly I have never been to a wedding that wasn’t cash bar. I like your idea I might consider that!

View Quoted Comment Good luck! I think it is a good happy medium of staying within your budget and making sure your guests are taken care of!

How many guests does that cover? 3k sounds very reasonable for an open bar. We're providing our own beer and wine for about 130 guests and I expect to spend about 3k on it.

We are looking at doing a combo.

Full open bar during the cocktail hour, then switching over to a cash bar for the reception.

View Quoted Comment Agreed! I was taken aback at how much people bash it but I have never gone to a wedding expecting an open bar in the first place. To each their own I guess 🤷🏻‍♀️

We're having an open bar as part of our package. The venue does the catering, beverages and all the works. It's $22 per adult which I don't think is a horrible sacrifice. A cash bar is tacky in my personal opinion and I want to make sure everyone has a great time.

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That's kind of interesting. I never heard of that method but I like it. I feel like it will even out with my crowd because for as many people that don't drink or will have one, there are others that will drink the others share lol. I'm intrigued by your venues/caterers method though.

Several friends in my circle have done a partially hosted bar where they provide each person with a drink ticket or two and then anything after that is cash bar. It's nice because people who don't want alcohol can just pass their tickets off to someone else, but you're at least giving people something for cocktail hour. My friends who did this for their January wedding just taped a little ticket to the back of each place card. Super slick. For our venue, it's under $1000 to do a drink ticket option like this for 135 people ($7/ticket) and covers beer, wine, and rail drinks (though their rail options are pretty decent!). We wanted all 3 options, though it would be slightly cheaper to offer just beer or wine, like $6/ticket, I think. It would be more expensive to have it totally open for an hour or two and then switch to a cash bar.

I've been to a couple of weddings where there wasn't a cash bar at all, but it was only wine or a beer or two offered, which was fine. I think a little bit of alcohol offered is a nice touch if you can afford it, but certainly wouldn't expect anyone to host all of my drinks.

Our venue is pretty flexible; can pay for open bar, make it a cash bar, or keep it open bar until you reach a specified dollar amount. They will notify us when we are reaching the specified dollar amount and we can choose to extend it or go to cash bar. Gives us a little flexibility.. if it is 30 minutes til the end of our reception we wouldn’t extend it but if it was say 2 hours in, we might. I’ve seen it at a few weddings 🤷🏻‍♀️ Gives everyone some free drinks but doesn’t break the bank

We are having an open bar! Cash Bar never even crossed our minds because we knew with our families that open bar was absolutely needed! No one wants to pay for their drinks at a wedding so I would definitely say open bar is the usual when it comes to weddings.

However, we are putting a timeline on our open bar. The bar will open at 5pm right when the ceremony ends and will close at 10pm. Our reception ends at 10:30.

I am not doing alcohol of any kind since our budget is $9000 total. We didn’t want to spend $3000+ on alcohol, especially since we are having a cake and punch ceremony

I think if you are torn it is perfectly acceptable to pay for beer and wine and leave liquor for pay. Personally, I hate paying for drinks-not only because you are buying the couple a gift, but, because it's a pain to have to worry about your wallet being out and dealing with a transaction in that environment. Either way, I'm sure you guests will love celebrating with you!! Congrats!

We have no choice but to have an open bar at ours. Our venue doesn't have a liquor license to sell so we have to provide all of the alcohol. Where I live, (SE WI) a lot of weddings I've been to will only have beer, wine and a signature drink as open bar and anything else specific is cash bar. It doesn't usually offend people because as long as they know ahead of time they can plan for it or will make due with what's available for them for free.