Those supplying own alcohol...

I haven't really budgeted a certain amount. When my Step Dad & I were making a spreadsheet of estimated costs he put in $1,000 for alcohol but I really have no idea if that is accurate. We are having about 150 people at our wedding. How many people are you inviting? We are planning on just doing beer, wine & a frozen margarita machine. My plan is to just buy what I can as we go (although I haven't bought anything yet).

I have less than 50 guests but many of the guys drink a lot so I will budget for a little more than that. I'm hoping $500 will cover it.

Finally Doing it- 500 seems high for that many people. What drinks are you having? How many actually drink? I have about 50. We spent 40$ on our one mixed drink we have, 40 - 50 on beer and 60-70 on wine. My FMIL is buying wine though.

(actual drinkers- maybe 25 people) I expect we will have several un opened bottles of wine and probably a left over case of beer.

We will probably spend 1,500.00 on the alcohol itself. The caterer is bringing all the mixers and stuff.

We budgeted $1000 for 100 guests, but we also are having a welcome party and many guests are staying the weekend, so we wanted to have extra. We are only serving beer and wine - and we could have spent less on the wine, but we wanted to serve local wines which are a little more expensive. There are many calculators online to help you estimate how much wine/beer you should have. Try one of these then calculate it out based on how much you'll spend on the drinks. If it helps, our beer is $17/case of 24 and $13/bottle of white wine and $15/bottle of red wine (minus 15% on the wine for buying it by the case). You can definitely get decent red wines for about $10 a bottle and you could do a keg rather than bottles to save more (if you feel comfortable with that at your wedding).

We are serving beer and wine. Have allowed $2000 for it. We are supplying it ourselves for 200 people

@bee j. That's a good idea to have the one mixed drink. I might do that! I think I'll have to buy a lot more beer than wine....if I know FH's friends. Lol

@busybride. I will look at the online calculators. Thanks!

I'll probably let FH handle the details of the alcohol since I don't drink much but it does sound like my $500 budget for it will work out fine. I am going through my budget and I just threw the $500 number on there so I wanted to see if I was even in the ballpark.

Thanks

We used this as a basis:

http://pinterest.com/offsite/?token=454-750&url=http%3A%2F%2Fapracticalwedding.com%2F2013%2F01%2Fcalculate-alcohol-for-wedding%2F&pin=263742121899996213

However, we skewed it to 60/40 beer/wine, because we have more beer drinking friends than wine. We aren't allowed liquor, so that saved us some money. We figure we will have 80-100 guests (a lot of our invites are out of town), and we have $640 for alcohol, $150 for non-alcohol (pop, water, & coffee). So far, we have spent $161 for 16 bottles of wine. We just need to buy the beer, so I believe we will be under budget (yay!).

What part of the country do you live in? We have BevMo here, and they do a 5 cent wine sale (buy one bottle, get a 2nd bottle of the same for 5 cents) every few months. That's how we bought all of our wine so cheaply. A lot of grocery stores offer discounts as well if you buy 6 bottles of wine at a time.

@Lirana. Yay for being under budget!! I live in Cali and we have BevMo. I'll go check it out. Thanks for that link! I will start stocking up now so I don't have to pay all at once. That will help a lot.

Evite has a drink calculator - here's the link

http://www.evite.com/pages/party/drink-calculator.jsp

We are buying most of our liquor at Sam's Club and they will let you return the unused portions for credit.

For wine - we talked to a local vineyard and they are doing a buy one case get one free for us, which was an awesome deal! Plus it gives our out of town guests a taste of our local wine.

Oh, awesome! When's your wedding? If it's not for a while, they will probably do another 5 cent sale in May or June. We got ours at the end of March/beginning of April.

I used to work in the wine biz and set up lots of wine orders for weddings large and small. I see you are planning on 50 people and have a budget of $500. How many hours will you be offering drinks and at what time of day?

@Melissa what a fantastic deal on the wine!! Thanks for the link, I'll pass it along to my FH.

@Lirana my wedding is May 2014 so I have a ton of time to stock up on the wine. I'll hit every sale I hear of.

@Miranda I'm pretty sure we will be having a sunset wedding and it will last at least 5 hours.

Oh, awesome! Just make sure you don't start stalking beer too early. Beer will go bad (in case you weren't aware). Liquor and wine though are fine.

Thanks Dale!!

@Lirana I wasn't sure about the beer so I wasn't going to stock up on that. Now I know. Thank you

This is FH's project so there will be plenty of Absolut Vodka Hennessy, Johnnie Walker (gold label) Chivas Remy Martin (Cognac) and several wines. He has been spending about $200/month for the past 3 months (and will continue to do so for several more months) purchasing the alcohol for the cocktail hour and reception. I asked him what the budget is and he said there isn't one.

@ForeverMyLove. Your FH is serious about his alcohol!! Lol No budget?? That's awesome!

I am under the impression that if a person pays for the alcohol they are legally responsible if the party who drinks it gets into a car crash or any legal troubles. I don't know if this is a state law in ohio, or a larger law. I decide to have a cash bar and only provide a champaign toast, and to put breath tests in the guest care packages in the mens and ladies room (carepackages= a basket with tampons, makeup remover, tide bleach pens, tums, asprin etc for all guests who come in to use). How are you guys tacking this legal question?

That's a great question Pauline and you will probably get many more responses if you ask this question in a new thread. I'm not too sure many people will read it here.