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Wedding Etiquette Forum
Destined04
member
Bars - Consumption or Per Person?
Hi ladies,
Our wedding date is less than 3 weeks away (Sept. 6)! I need to select a bar package and am considering the consumption option, as I'm wondering if it's more economical than paying $34/person for people that only have a glass of wine. We have some folks from church who just don't drink, but we have some others that will have 4 or 5 beverages during the 4 hours.
I'm thinking this may balance out to where we can have a $5K bar tab for 185 guests and offer top tier liquor for $12/drink. By my math, on the expensive end that should pay for 416 top tier liquor drinks, which is 2.25 drinks per guest. By the time some folks drink the tea provided by the caterer, some have a glass of wine and some others have multiple cocktails, it should balance out. Thoughts?
Has anyone else done a consumption bar? How many guests did you have? What budget did you allocate towards it? Did it last for 4 hours?
Look forward to your thoughts!
Our wedding date is less than 3 weeks away (Sept. 6)! I need to select a bar package and am considering the consumption option, as I'm wondering if it's more economical than paying $34/person for people that only have a glass of wine. We have some folks from church who just don't drink, but we have some others that will have 4 or 5 beverages during the 4 hours.
I'm thinking this may balance out to where we can have a $5K bar tab for 185 guests and offer top tier liquor for $12/drink. By my math, on the expensive end that should pay for 416 top tier liquor drinks, which is 2.25 drinks per guest. By the time some folks drink the tea provided by the caterer, some have a glass of wine and some others have multiple cocktails, it should balance out. Thoughts?
Has anyone else done a consumption bar? How many guests did you have? What budget did you allocate towards it? Did it last for 4 hours?
Look forward to your thoughts!
This discussion has been closed.
Re: Bars - Consumption or Per Person?
The only thing I'll say is that you should factor in how many of your drinkers might be beer drinkers instead of hard alcohol. That could significantly bring down your $12/drink estimate. Personally, I think mid-tier liquor is fantastic, but it's nice you're wanting to host so generously. I think once you factor in beer costs being less, your estimate of $5k is probably more than safe.
Depends on your crowd.
Also, talk to your venue...we paid per person, but our venue was willing to remove the people that do not drink at all. So i was able to remove a few people who were recovering alcoholics who had been sober for a dozen years, as well as some people that do not drink for religious reasons. i also left off a pregnant friend who will not drink at all, but left in a pregnant friend who drinks a glass or two of wine occassionally. (don't just assume that everyone who is pregnant abstains completely.)
If we had a more general population and an evening reception, we would have gone with the per-person rate. As it was, we paid for a lot of sodas!
We had a consumption bar with very reasonable drink prices for us.* We had beer, wine, champagne, well liquor and call liquor (excluded the super fancy high end stuff) and price per drink topped out at $5.50 for a call level liquor drink. Our consumption bar bill averaged out to about $20 per guest of drinking age - excluding non-alcoholic drinks offered at the bar.
We also didn't have many heavy drinkers among our guests. And a decent number of our guests were not drinking (due to pregnancy or medical conditions). We factored all this in when deciding to go consumption.
My friend from college's wedding several years ago has a per person bar. She came up to us during the reception and (jokingly) told us that we all need to drink more because she had paid for the bar per person and people weren't drinking enough to make it worth it. But if we had all been the lushes she thought we would (read, if more of us were staying at the hotel instead of driving the hour home that night), I'm sure she would have saved a ton.
*Note for lurkers: another reason not to have a cash bar - hosted bar prices are often less per drink than cash bar prices. Drinks at our wedding cost us almost $1 less per drink than it would have cost our guests if we had a cash bar.
We are going with consumption, but we are also only serving wine, beer and sangria. The bar package for the same would have been $32 per person. We are expecting around 160 guests. Under the consumption tab, we'll be paying $5 per drink (beer, wine, or sangria) and $2.5 per soda. Our reception is 6 hours long. (If the party goes that long. We have the venue and the vendors until midnight, but we can always choose to end at 11 and transition to unhosted after-party across the street at the bar at 11 if we want.)
If we had gone with per person, we would have been at $5120, which under the consumption tab is about 6.5 drinks per guest.
When we considered that about 40ish of our guests are elderly and will probably leave after the cake cutting and probably will drink 2 glass of wine before that... the fact there will be about 10 teenagers (we wouldn't get a per person discount for them, even though they would be drinking only soda)... the fact there would be a handful of preggo ladies... the fact there is also the chance of one or two no-shows, and the fact that our heaviest drinkers are all in the wedding party and thus won't even be drinking during the cocktail hour because they'll be taking photos, it just seemed highly unlikely we could even get close to averaging 6.5 drinks per person.
When our wedding coordinator told us that she had never seen a consumption tab come to even close what a per person tab was we thought she was crazy. But when we did the math, we could see how that would be super common. When we were debating between three different caterers, only one even offered consumption. When we asked the other two if we could do it, they were both adamant that we could not. Which gave me the feeling they thought it would be lower too.
Our coordinator is going to notify us when we hit $5k in case we want to end the reception early. But I'm really not worried about it at all.
But it really is a know your crowd sort of thing - I have seen it go both ways where the consumption bill was significantly lower and where people were practically bankrupted by the bar total at the end of the night. The rule of thumb is to estimate two drinks for the cocktail hour and one drink per hour of the reception (and that is for everyone - some will drink way more than that if they aren't the designated driver and some will drink less). Also remember, if you have juice available for mixers, many non-drinkers will order them and that will count towards your tab as well. And factor in the type of reception - a dance party with a DJ will have a higher bar total than a quiet dine and dash type reception. HOWEVER...
At one of the venues where I previously worked, we did have an option (not advertised, but something our event coordinator would arrange) where the bar could start out as consumption, but if the bar tab ended up exceeding the amount that it would have been had they gone the per person route, then we charged them the lesser of the two amounts at the end of the night. Have you tried talking to your venue and seeing if this is something they would be willing to negotiate with you?
Welp, we chose wrong. Our consumption bar ended up costing us about 1/3 more than the flat fee would have cost. That's because my estimates were based on two main assumptions that turned out to be wrong for our crowd. They were:
1) People will drink on average 2 drinks for the first hour and one drink per hour after that, leaving with us an average of 6 drinks per person for our 5 hour reception. Our guests averaged nearly 8 drinks each.
2) The breakdown of drinks consumed will be about 65% wine/15% beer/20% liquor. Our guests consumed about 20% wine/20% beer/60% liquor. Guess which option was most expensive? Oops.
Those assumptions are apparently what event planners use as a rule of thumb, so I'm sure they are probably pretty accurate for most crowds. But not all crowds, apparently!
Just one more data point for you to consider.