Our venue lets us purchase beer by the keg and wine by the bottle, not by the glass like a lot of other venues we looked into. However, just how many kegs and bottles of wine should we buy?
Fortunately for me, many other brides and party planners have run into the same conundrum and many people have had the sense to create wedding drink calculators.
However, the typical rule of thumb I have heard is:
- 4 to 5 glasses of wine per 750ml bottle
- 1 glass of wine per person per hour
- 100-120 glasses of beer per keg
- 1 to 1.5 glasses of beer per person per hour
But here are some more scientific calculators:
1. RealSimple - This one is just okay. It doesn't let you give specific guest count, which is fine for the early stages of planning. According to this calculator, we will need 2 to 3 kegs, and about 45 bottles of each red and white wine.
3. Perfect Party Planning - Now, this calculator gets really specific and will require you to know a lot about your guest drinking habits. Like who is a heavy drinker and who is a light drinker. According to this site, we will need 315 bottles/cans of beer (or about 3 kegs) and 63 bottles of wine.
For the rehearsal dinner or some of the showers we can use this simple chart:
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At my wedding people drank way less than I thought they would. We were allowed to bring in our own stuff and just hired a bartender from our catering company. It was great because it gave us the ability to be choosy about our beers and wines :) But also daunting for calculating what we'd need.
ReplyDeleteYou look like you're calculating for 5 hours, but you have to remember that during dinner itself, which is about 45-60 min, people usually have only 1 or 1.5 drinks. A lot of people will drink water or another non-alcoholic option with dinner so they don't fill up. So, really that's cutting down some of your calculation time.
Be sure to ask your venue if you're able to "take back" stuff that you don't use. If so, then you can over buy and still get refunded. We ended up taking back probably 6 cases of wine (mostly white!) and 12 cases of beer (mostly lager). I can't remember how much we bought total, but I think it was like 12 cases of wine and 21 cases of beer. We only had 60 people though.