My fiance and I settled on a venue for the reception, and it was after we got the ppp reduced by about $20 a person. (They removed an extra tray of cookies, a carving meat, and changed the 5-hour open bar to a 1-hour bar + 4 hours "per consumption.") THEN they said they would knock off another almost $10 a person if we would wait a week and have our October wedding in November. Now my fiance is saying that if we have it in November, his family that would be flying from South America might run into issues at their children's schools, pulling them out during finals week. So okay, back to only $20 less.
Now that you have the backstory, here comes the question: has anyone ever done or attended a wedding that closed the open bar early? If so, how was it received?
Ideally, I would like to do 2 hours of open bar, 2 hours of per consumption, and then close the bar for the 5th hour. OR, I would like to do a 2 hour open bar, and then close the bar. I came into this knowing that I didn't want people to have to pay for their drinks, but I come from a family of non-drinkers. I am inviting a lot of people from the church, and I also have several "non-church-going" friends who don't drink, or if they do drink, they don't care either way whether they can or not. To me, I cannot justify paying around $400 to add another hour of open bar if only a handful of people will be ordering wine or a beer. And if I'm completely wrong, I don't want to rack up a per consumption bill too high to front after the wedding.
Help! We're having it at an old rustic building, not really all that fancy, but it's exactly what we're looking for. And we're having a small wedding, inviting around 105 people. So I think that maybe people would consider the 2 hour open bar to be generous of us being as though it is a small wedding.
Am I completely wrong?