Stocking your own bar

At our venue they don't have a liquour license to hold it but we can bring it in ourselves and serve it at the wedding. They have a liquor place they have worked with for years. We just go to them and tell them what we are looking for, a full bar, beer/wine and such and they will give you a list of what you need! They even take back anything that was not opened at the wedding and you get the money back. Ask your venue or a lot of these liquor places themselves may be able to give you an idea.

When I did mine for 140 people I did the following:

1- 1/2 Keg

1- 1/4 Keg

2 - Bottles White Zynfedel (sp)

2- Bottles Chardennay (sp)

Coconut Rum

Vodka

Peach Tree

Captain

Black Velvet

Segrams 7

Hypnotiq

Bicardi

Southern Comfort

Where are you buying your alcohol? We are allowed to bring our own. We are doing wine and beer only. However, we are trying to get the minature alcohol bottles of limoncello and amaretto as after diner favors. I have tried looking online to see if I can oder some but maybe I am overlooking something. Someone mentioned costco to me once. Does Costco sell alcohol? And do they have minature bottles? Anyone know?

Did you see this post?

https://www.weddingwire.com/wedding-forums/found-cool-party-planning-tool-for-how-much-wine-to-buy/25175a0037e2eb86.html

Who is serving the alcohol at the recpetion? I'd have them help you put together a selection based on what's most popular.

You cannot allow guests to serve themselves! It's a serious legal liability issue- and you have no control over how much they consume. If anyone gets drunk, you are legally liable. If someone under 21 has a drink, you can be criminally charged with serving to minors.

You need a licensed bartender to serve it- and they can help you estimate how much of what to have.

My caterer allows you to stock your own bar without a corkage fee. yay! We have a Trader Joes here that has $3 wine that is good and we plan on costco for the beer. We meet with the caterer Sunday - I am sure they can help. I was just trying to tweak my budget.

My venue had a list of what to buy that was pretty accurate. If you google alcohol calculator there are several websites that have beer and wine calculators. E-vite has a good one.

You can also get good info on wine and alcohol amounts from larger liquor stores. I got all my stuff from a place called Total Wine, they will take back unopened bottles of wine and champagne, and unopened cases of beer after the wedding so what doesn't get used, you get your money back on. If you have a BevMo around I think they do the same things.

We bought alcohol for my sister's wedding b/c the venue didn't provide it, we also had to get a bar tender. We got a lot from Sam's and my Uncle sold wine and was able to get that for us. We had some, but not much left over, it was a 3 hour reception and there may have been 200 people there.

We got a couple of bottles of the liquor of choice. Crown is popular amongst the men in my family so we had extra. Also, we had Bud Lite bottles, there was no keg, we like bottles and i think the last resort was the cans of Coors that were what was left at the 3rd hour, but once it was over there was no beer left only about a bottle and a half of liquor.

We had the basics, nothing to make fancy drinks, just stuff like rum and coke.

I think it depends on how your guests will drink. My family tends to be heavy drinkers at weddings (we are Irish-Catholic).

Here is a liquer calculator http://www.realsimple.com/holidays-entertaining/weddings/wedding-wine-liquor-calculator-00000000008314/index.html but make sure you check with your state guidelines because some states will not allow you to do it. You have to have a liquer license.

Saturday junuary 18

Four thrifty afternoon