Self-serve bar or bar tender

Based on what you described, I’m sure your guests can manage serving themselves sangria and/or rum and Coke. We have a bartender for our wedding. But FH and I have a lot of parties (and a LOT of liquor) and we allow guests to be their own bartenders.... and It works out well. So if you only have two alcohol options, I’m sure you’ll be fine without a bartender

As A point of reference.... for our parties, FH and I allow our guests full access to both of these carts (one has clear liquor/wine and the other has brown liquor). Our guests are their own bartenders and we never have any issues. So your sangria and Rum & Coke choices will be easy for guests at a casual reception.

Bartender. Self serve alcohol is a huge liability and you could be held responsible if someone drinks underage, gets a DUI, or heaven forbid hurts themselves or someone else.

View Quoted Comment This. And do not make friends or family work at your wedding.


The only exception might be if you were having a casual backyard BBQ with maybe 10 guests then a DIY bar would probably be ok.

Hire a bartender. There’s so many factors that go into serving alcohol that you don’t need to consider at a regular house party. Don’t leave yourselves or a relative responsible for monitoring drinks or alcohol intake, or any consequences that may come from them.

Your venue is ok with self serve or no? For me I opted out of doing a bar service. Our venue provided us wine though but the way they did it was they just left a couple bottles on each table.

Hire a bartender. Worth every dime.

Self serve is a huge liability. Because of this you should check both your vendor contract as well as local/state laws before even considering self-serve - allowing guests to self-serve may be illegal or may result in you being held responsible for any incidents that may occur due to drinking, everything from property damage to injury or death. Keep in mind that liquor may be regulated differently than beer and wine.

Personally, I would only consider self serve at a small wedding if I knew all my guests well, and I'd be more apt to go that route if we were only serving beer and wine and didn't have any guests under the age of 21. The last thing I want to do on my wedding day is need to care for guests who have been drinking too much.

A bartender will help, two if possible, after the ceremony, everyone ran to the bar lol for about 30 minutes, we needed two (we planned that ahead). Self serve may get messy. We had a backyard style wedding and had bartenders just to keep things from getting messy and drunk people pouring their own drinks lol it was so much fun tho and the bartender had fun too!

My venue does not require a bartender, just that we follow the state laws. And the state laws do not require any kind of permit or license for a wedding reception.


I only consider self serve because we will not have a lot of guests drinking or any underage that would even know what alcohol is. We are planning on having 150-200 people and out of that maybe 25 will be drinking. We are also planning on having a shuttle to the hotel Incase anyone is unable to drive.