Making sure you have enough alcohol and the right mix of beer, wine, & cocktails at your wedding or event can be a confusing task.  Although there is no one size fits all approach for planning your drink menu, we have some helpful guidelines that can help you with your planning process.

The general rule of thumb for a normal evening wedding or event calls for 1 drink per drinking guest per hour.  So if you have a 4 hour reception and 100 drinking guests, you would want to plan for 400 servings of alcohol. If you are also hosting a cocktail hour, guests tend to drink 2 drinks in this first hour, so factor in 2 drinks per guest for that hour. So, a 4 hour reception plus a 1 hour cocktail hour and 100 drinking age guests would mean you would want to plan for 600 servings.

This is of course a guideline only.  Some other factors that play into this include the timing of your event.  Having a morning or afternoon party?  Guests will likely not hit the drinks quite as hard.  Have a large number of family and friends that like to have a good time when it comes to the bar?  You may want to up this number slightly.  You know your group better than anyone, so you will have to apply some logic here.

Knowing the total number of servings is just half the equation.  Next, you need to determine how many drinks of each type you plan to serve.  If you are going with a beer and wine only bar, we recommend 60% for beer, and 40% for wine.  Again, you need to know your family and friends to fully decide if this describes the makeup of your group, or whether you should adjust for more or less beer or wine.