Wedding Blog

Since we’re not hiring a caterer, and our site isn’t one that has any pre-approved arrangements regarding alcohol, it’s up to us to provide for our guests. This is really great for us, since we get to avoid the over-inflated costs charged by many vendors–we can order our wine by the case from Aldi (a grocery store owned by the Trader Joe’s people, which has a great selection of alcohol at *really* cheap prices) and choose our own favorite beers. Plus, no $3 sodas.

To cut costs, we decided to just offer wine and beer to drink. We’ll have plenty of it there, so guests can still have a good time, but we won’t have to rent an entire bar set-up. Plus, since many of our guests are older (very few are under 21), we don’t anticipate them all drinking–so our alcohol expenses should be relatively low.

I was aided greatly by this handy-dandy guide offered by BC Liquor Stores (pdf).

Here are my calculations:
We’re inviting about 140 people. Of those (assuming that everyone RSVP’s yes, which won’t happen), only 100 or so would even have one drink. So we’ll go ahead and plan for the full 100, because I’m sure that others in the group (Mr. Blueberry’s frat brothers) will negate any “savings” provided by the people who will only have one or two (parents’ friends). The guide tells me to multiply this by 4 drinks per person: 100×4=400 drinks total. Each bottle of wine contains about 6 glasses, so if we were doing just wine, we’d need 67 bottles (400/6=67). I’m not sure how Boulevard beer is sold, but if it’s in cases of 12 we’ll need 34 cases(400/12=about 34) and if it’s in cases of 24 we’ll need about 17 cases (400/24=about 17). We’ll probably round up and add a few extra bottles and an extra case or two, just to be on the safe side–many liquor stores will buy back unopened cases of alcohol after an event, so it’s a safe precaution at no extra cost.

But those calculations are for *just* wine or *just* beer, and we’re planning on offering both…so do we just buy half and half, or more beer than wine (since most of the drinkers are college guys), or more wine than beer (since it’s cheaper overall)?

Besides the alcohol, we’re also going to offer bottled water with personalized labels, soda, a coffee bar, and cartons of milk. I’m not quite so sure about the quantities of those to purchase. We don’t want to force our guests to drink alcohol because we’ve run out of everything else, but at the same time it’ll be a lot harder to get rid of 50 extra mini milk cartons than a couple extra cases of wine. My speculation is that since it’s an evening wedding, the coffee won’t be too popular. And I imagine not everyone will drink the milk, and anyone who does will probably just have one carton. But how much soda to buy? How much water?

For those of you who are already married, can you help me? Do you know anything about the soda and bottled water consumption at your wedding?

I guess if nothing else I’ll just do a straight up 2 per guest or something, but I’d rather not horribly over-buy.