Enough Refreshments

serena569

We are having about 250 guests at our May wedding and serving lemonade and iced tea with 3-4 types of liquor to mix in.  Our thought is that people can have it plain or spike it if they want.  There will be no bartender - just a couple day-of coordinators covering the details.  My BIL is a craft brewer so he will also be making a special wedding beer.  His family owned an A&W so maybe we can talk him in to brewing root beer too.  If we can't, we will not be serving any soda.  There will also be bottled water.  So...how many bottles of liquor do I need?  How much beer should be brewed?  Also, what are your opinions on not serving wine?  My biggest fear is running out of refreshments,  

KerisaHarman21

This is definitely a difficult question to answer, my suggestion is ditch the mixed in type of liquor because you honestly will not be able to really know how much people are going to pour into their spiked lemonade or iced tea so there is a couple options, I would suggest premixing  both spiked and non spiked and leaving it at that, not to mention some people don't do very well when they have options of mixing 3-4 different types of liquor and beer, you don't want to make your guests sick and hung over! I would plan on giving each person 2 beers each and 2 glasses of spiked each I would have more non spiked refreshements and bottled waters than liquor.

Maggie0829

I am horrible with numbers but I am sure another poster can help you with that.

But I will say that you should hire bartenders to serve the drinks.  They will be able to keep the bar area clean and organized as well as keep an eye on guests in case some over indulge and then they can be cut off.  When you hire bartenders you turn the liability from yourself to them if something were to happen to do over consumption of alcohol.

serena569

We are not a group of heavy dinkers so we have no concerns about people overindulging.  We are also in our late 40s so the hard partying days are long behind us and our friends.  We did decide to add Sangria to our beverage choices because we can mix that as needed.