Hi! My fiance and I are planning a September wedding in the DC area where we live and have a fair number of out of town friends/family attending. Unfortunately we can only cover the cost of inviting close family and wedding party members/dates to the rehearsal dinner on Friday night, but would like to have an informal meet up arranged for guests who would like to go out Friday night, so we can see them for more than just a few hours on Saturday!
I have already found a fun bar with skee ball/shuffle board two blocks from the Hotel where we're getting married that is reserving a spot for us starting at 9 p.m. and I want to spread the word on our wedding website. We are planning on buying people a nice steak/seafood dinner + full open bar on Saturday for the wedding (plus farewell breakfast on Sunday), but just can't swing a post-rehearsal dinner paid for event on top of it all. My dad thinks I need to put something on our website about it being a cash bar so people don't think their drinks are free -- I already included a statement that it's an informal get together for anyone who wants to join, thinking this would get the point across, but maybe he is right that I need to make clear this isn't a "hosted" event. I have been to similar pre-and-post wedding events in the past though and never assumed the bride and groom would pay for anything beyond the wedding.
Does anyone have any wording ideas for how I could state this without sounding tacky? Do most people understand that an informal meet up at a bar is not open bar? I know some people have done these things by word of mouth, but since we have so many different groups of out of town guests who don't know the area coming in town, I'm worried not everyone will get the message/it would be nice to give guests the bar name/addres/time to meet up, etc. in writing.
Thoughts?!?