10 days! Still need alcohol!

tokash516

Hello ladies!!!

We are doing beer and wine and our guest count is about 80.  How much alcohol is everyone doing?  Typical 4 hour reception....some heavy drinkers.

celticmyss

When I was trying to estimate costs I found this calculator very handy:

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

volleygurl0306

Wherever you are buying from, find out if you can return unopened cases/boxes.  Some places let you (I think costco is one of them..and they tend to be cheaper than most places).  If you can then you can overbuy without busting the budget or running out of alcohol!

calindi

We bought from family friends so we saved over 30% on our cost, and they'll let us return, so we definitely over-bought.

We're serving beer, wine, & two signature drinks - sangria & sweet tea vodka cocktail.

We have 110 drinking guests - we rounded that up to 120, estimated that half would be wine drinkers, half would be beer drinkers, and using the sangria & sweet tea vodka drink as an additional thing.

For our 6 hour reception, we estimated 5 drinks per person.  You're supposed to estimate 1 drink per hour per person, but that can be more or less, especially as the night goes on.  So consumption might decline as the night goes on.  Anyway, we picked 6 drinks.

So with 60 people drinking 6 beers per hour, we wanted to have 360 beers on hand. The average wine we're pouring is 6 oz, and a bottle is approximately 25.4 oz, and so we have approximately 4 drinks per bottle (rounding up, as bartenders are likely to be more heavy handed occasionally).  Since we need 360 drinks for those 60 people who we estimate will be wine drinkers, we need 90 bottles of wine.  We split that into 35 red, 35 white, and 20 sparkling.

Then we bought booze for sangria - again, we estimated that 60 people would drink sangria (mind you, we've already covered our 120 guests, this is additional estimation).  At 6-7 oz per cup, this would be similar to the wine.  I increased the recipe and found that I needed 7 large bottles - 1.5 L - of cheap Barefoot wine, 2 bottles of peach schnapps, and 2 bottles of brandy.  For the vodka drink, we needed 4 bottles of sweet tea vodka, 2 bottles of regular vodka.  Our caterer is supplying the rest.

shaina925

We are having open bar and they are providing the liquor..makes it easy that way!