Ok, so here is the BIG question: How much booze will we need? I've done some research on various wedding & event planning websites, but they all seem to have different ideas of what constitutes "enough". Its important to me as a host to make sure that our guests are amply provided for and well satisfied; I want our bar to be generous and well-stocked without going overboard. Our wedding theme is Abundance, after all!
I know that a lot of people won't drink very much, and some folks will leave shortly after dinner - but a lot of folks ARE planning to camp overnight and could still be drinking around the bonfire well into the early morning. A lot of the wedding & event planning sites assume that you are going to have a time limit for the reception (out of the ballroom by 11pm, etc.) but that just doesn't apply to us.
According to evite.com's
drink calculator, for a 6 hour party with 150 average-drinking guests (we'll assume that the heavy drinkers and the light/non-drinkers balance out), we need:
18 1-liter bottles of liquor (that's about 325 shots)
70 750ml (normal sized) bottles of wine (about 350 glasses)
350 bottles of beer (1 standard keg = aprox 165 bottles)
about 400 8 oz servings of mixers, juice, water and soda
plus hot coffee, tea & cocoa for the evening
Does this seem reasonable to you guys? Is it enough, or not enough?
I'm particularly wondering about the liquor and the wine. We are planning to have 2 standard kegs of beer from Boundary Bay, plus Gabe, Nick & Tombi are bringing a couple of batches of homebrew. Assuming 350 bottles is a good estimate of how much we'll need, then we're covered on beer.
There are a couple of important points to consider on the liqour:
1. We can return un-opened liquor bottles for a refund, so it is preferable to overbuy than not to have enough.
2. I figure we should have Tequila, Rum, Gin, Wiskey and Vodka, but how much of each kind? Equal proportions, or what? What about subtypes, like silver/gold tequila, or scotch/rye/bourbon?
3. What about things like Khalua, Peppermint Schnaps, Grand Marnier, etc.? Should we stock a few bottles of that sort of thing for mixing up fancier cocktails? Or just stick to standard mixers like Coke, 7-up, tonic water, ginger ale, orange juice, cranberry juice and lemonade?
As for wine, well, there are worse things than having a bunch of left-over wine in the pantry, so again, it's better to overbuy than to run out. Also, we can give away unopened bottles as "Thank You" gifts to all the folks who are volunteering to help out. The big question is how much of each color. I have read sites that say to have 2:1 white over red, sites that say just the opposite, and some that simply say to have equal amounts of each. Personally, I prefer red wine about 80% of the time, but that's just me... and I'm certainly not going to be the only one drinking all this wine!
For toasting purposes I'm thinking Mead instead of Champagne. Sure, champagne bottles are fun to open, but I don't know anybody who actually enjoys drinking it. We'd need 30 bottles (x 5 glasses per bottle) to make sure that everyone can raise a glass to us. I'm going to contact HoneyMoon in Bellingham to see if we can get any kind of a deal from them for that. But in the meantime, one more question: should I subtract the 30 bottles for the toast from the 70-bottle wine allotment, or consider it a separate thing entirely?
Aiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!
I'll have to put a disclamer in the program: "This wedding is an original hodgepodge of elements borrowed from other people's real-life weddings, liberally sprinkled with crazy ideas of my own. Any similarities between it and any wedding magazine, living or dead, is purely coincidental."
