Weddingbee Blog

Alcohollllllll…

One of the awesome things about our reception venue is that we get to select every single vendor instead of relying on a predetermined list. This is also one of the worst things, as I have come to learn, but today we are focusing on the good parts. Because it’s Friday. And only good things are allowed on Fridays.

The really good parts:

Image Credit: Socialtik Mag

(Can you tell I am ready for the weekend?)

Picking our alcohol vendor. Yum.

Our caterer, although awesome, does not currently provide bar services. So, one of our recent tasks was finding a vendor to provide such services for our wedding. (No, this did not include a tasting. Lame, I know.)

In preparation for our meeting, Mr. Pony and I looked into how much alcohol we should expect our guests to imbibe over the course of our reception. Of course, we turned to the internet and its vast supply of calculators and suggestions.

The first drink calculator we used was from Real Simple. The options in the calculator were rather broad, which made me worried that the results would not be very accurate.

Screenshot via Real Simple

The Real Simple calculator provided estimates for groups of 100 and 150 people, which were:

Screenshot via Real Simple

The next drink calculator we found was from Evite, and it was based on 100 average drinkers of beer, wine, and liquor for six hours:

Screenshot via Evite

In case you can’t read that, it says 234 beers, 47 bottles of wine, and 12 bottles of liquor. OK. We are getting closer, but 12 bottles of liquor without any differentiation was of no help to me.

Finally, we looked at That’s a Wrapper. While it did not have a calculator like the other sites, it did provide a breakdown based on 50 guests.

Screenshot via That’s a Wrapper

This “calculator” requires some math (ugh, math) to be a functional tool for our party of 100 drinkers, so it is obviously not ideal. It did, however, remind me that we should consider mixers and liqueurs unless we want our guests taking shots and chasing them with beer and wine all night. This calculator does not specify the length of the party nor the number of beers needed, so its usefulness was only marginal.

My general complaint about these drink calculators is lack of specificity. Nothing seemed to clearly define the types of liquor, and the one that did had somewhat questionable choices (no tequila…uhh…what??).

After the internet failed us with inadequate alcohol calculators, we decided to make our own chart based on what we found and adjusting based on the tastes of our drinking friends. We figured we could take it to our alchie man (AKA bar vendor) and he would be so impressed with how prepared we were and he would offer us some amazing discount as we toasted to our preparedness.

Our booze list

After all of this research and spreadsheets, our alchie man told us to throw it away because we would be paying per drink anyway. Really? You couldn’t have told us this before all our research? Now we have to throw another 100-person party to make all our time invested in this project worthwhile. Thanks, alchie man.

Anyway, one good thing our alchie man did was tell us that we could pick out our own wine rather than relying on the *cough* gross *cough* wine some bars offer. Points for alchie man!

So, Mr. Pony and I came up with an awesome plan for picking our wedding wine. Want to hear it? Well, you’ll have to wait until next time ’cause those mixed drinks up there are calling me home.