Buying alcohol?

Question

Were having a wedding for approx. 200 guests and we have to supply the alcohol. How on earth do I decide what kind, and most importantly, how much booze to buy.I would say most guests are moderate drinkers. Were on a very limited budget, so I dont want enough leftover to last a lifetime. Any help is appreciated!

Answer 1

Have a cash bar - they buy their own drinks.   Most place that host wedding parties offer that option.

Answer 2

Figure 1.5 drinks per person for moderate drinkers, which means 300 drinks.  Do you want to do beer, wine and hard liquor?  If you include hard liquor, you will also need ice and mixers.  Beer is easy, 1 beer = 1 drink.  Decent wine usually comes in 750 mL bottles, which means means approximately 4 - 6 oz drinks per bottle.  Hard liquor is 1 oz = 1 very generous drink, so in a 750 mL bottle you can get 25 drinks easy.  Also for every bottle of hard liquor you will need 5 times the volume for mixers to make an 8 oz drink, plus 3 oz of ice per drink.

Once you figure out what kind of alcohol your group will drink or what you want to provide you can work off those estimations.  If you just want to figure 1/3rd each you need 100 beers, which is about 4 cases of cans/bottles.  100 glasses of wine is 600 ounces or about 25 -750 mL bottles.  Hard liquor is tricky, though because somebody might drink vodka and not gin, or scotch and not tequila, etc.  Then some mixers go with some drinks and not others.  This one will be tough to figure out.  Figure the basics are vodka, gin, scotch, bourbon, and rum, so if you buy one bottle of each, you will need several bottles of soda water, tonic water, cola, etc to make mixed drinks, plus a bottle of vermouth to make martinis and manhattans.

Answer 3

if  u know what most people are going to drink then just get that if not then hire a bartender and just go from that if u have like only a few alcoholics then ask them what thay most likey drink and just get that. otherwise just do a mix but of only so many and if u run out u run out... just take a whild guess then...

Answer 4

Alcohol can get quite expensive. You can do several things, Cash bar,serve wine and beer,with a champagne toast,have a limited bar of just your basic.