How much Liquor to buy...

SarahBara7

I have a venue where it is mandatory to supply all the liquor and beer.  I'm having approximately 250 guests who are mostly all drinkers.  I have no clue how much I should order.  Wondering if anyone has any ideas and/or websites where you can get a guesstimate of how much I should order.

acaponi87

I read a book called "Wedding Chic" several months ago that had a section on buying your own liquor. I'm pretty sure it gave a formula of sorts to estimate. I do remember it saying that people generally wayyy overestimate this. I wish I could help you more, but the book is 5 hours away from me right now you may wanna check it out.

Do you supply wine too? Lots of people drink wine at weddings

SarahBara7

That helps me A LOT!  Thank you so much!  It's hard for me though because I do have HEAVY drinkers invited, high high tolerances!

SarahBara7

Also, I do supply the wine as well.  However, I'm putting my table numbers on custom labels and will have a red and white bottles at each table.

matuofm

I'm more of a wine drinker, but I picked liquor because sometimes I likes me a whiskey sour.

We supplied our own alcohol, and we definitely overbought - we had family members taking home whole cases of beer - and there are two more in our front closet right now.  That said, we also had an afternoon wedding with no dancing that lasted for only a couple of hours.  If you have a more traditional wedding, you'll probably go through a lot more alcohol per person than we did.

There are lots of drink calculators online, but a fairly typical suggestion is two drinks per person for the first hour of the party and then 1 drink per person for every hour after that.  So for a party with 100 people, lasting 6 hours, you're talking 700 drinks - after that, you just have to determine beer/wine/liquor percentages and buy accordingly.

I generally suggest overbuying party supplies because it's better to have too much than to run out.  But keep in mind that it's illegal to return alcohol in MI, so there's no point in buying extra with the intent of returning what isn't used.

Sue-n-Kevin

Just a suggestion: When it's time to buy your wine (and beer if you want), go to Champane's Wine Cellars in Warren. It's on 13 Mile between Van Dyke & Mound. We went there and had a wine manager walk us around to get what we'd need. I specified number of wine drinkers, gave him a budget of $10 per bottle, and we picked out a mix of various whites and reds, some dessert wines and champage. Got 24 bottles for $220. My guests raved about it. My guests raved about the wine and many had a favorite amongst our selection.

YOu have to sort of drink wine to know what you want, or you can ask the wine manager. We were done in about 30-40 minutes.

Tanya2012

I found this one as an idea of what we may need:

http://www.realsimple.com/holidays-entertaining/weddings/wedding-wine-liquor-calculator-00000000008314/index.html

You can also do a search and find more  

We have heavy drinkers attending ours too, but since it's over a long period they will probably drink beer or wine most of the time and then a couple glasses of liquor.  We're spending most of our money on beer and wine followed by some "half gallons" of the popular things like rum, vodka and bourbon and maybe a fifth of tequila.  We only have a 100 guests though!

Tanya2012

Trader Joe's always has inexpensive wine options too!  That's what we're going with

lisa89760

We bought our own booze and we had 247 guests with the majority of them being drinkers.  Here is what we bought (from memory):

18 fifths of vodka (and we ran out at like 11:00 pm)
8-10 fifths of rum (one full bottle left over)
8 fifths of gin (none left)
5 bottles of Jack Daniels
3 bottles of Captain Morgans
5 bottles of scotch
5 bottles of whiskey
5 fifths of tequila
2 half gallons of Jager
2 half gallons of Crown Royal
2 half gallons of good tequila (all the half gallons were for shots)
2 half barrels and one quarter barrel of beer (the quarter barrel was left and 90% full)
13 cases of wine (156 bottles) - we put 2 bottles on each table, rest was behind the bar
3 cases of champagne (36 bottles) for the champagne toast
We also had a michigan bar that consisted of 2 cases of oberon, 2 cases of badass beer, 5 fifths of hard luck vodkas (different flavors) a fifth of gin, tequila and rum made at new holland, 3 fifths of vodka from grand traverse and 10 bottles of michigan wine.

That being said...we only were left with one full fifth of bacardi, a handful of fifths with a little left in them, and a quarter barrel left.  Then about 2 cases of wine left. 

We also bought 2 cases of red bull and a bunch of faygo pop for our michigan bar.  The wine we got at a crazy discount since 2 of my cousins (who were my flower girls parents) work for 2 different wine distributors, we would've never bought that much if we had to pay full price for it.

A lot of liquor stores will take back un opened bottles of liquor/kegs and give you a discount for buying in bulk.

SarahBara7

Thanks Lisa .... your post helped me a lot!