Buying booze and beer for a wedding

[Rockford35]

Ok, here's my "dilemma".

We're having about 140 guests at a reception that we're hosting for our wedding. I've been in charge of coming up with a buying scheme for booze. Since the property that we're renting out doesn't allow liquor "sales", we can't have a 3rd party come in and sell/give out booze. Some stupid technicality, but whatever.

My question lies in this. How much booze do you buy/expect people to drink?

1. It's free. No cash being taken or given.

2. The reception is only three hours long, from 7-10pm. It's extremely casual and promoted as a come and go. We wanted it this way, as a colleague did it for his wedding and it was a huge success. (I would ask him on booze numbers, but he did kegs and wine only, so he's not really much help.

3. I want to have a good selection of beer. We're gonna get 4 or 5 cases of wine too, as this is a big wine crowd. I would say 1 in 3 are hard alcohol guys, the rest drink lots - LOTS - of beer.

Any suggestions? To make things worse/better, the GF's parents are flipping the bill for this evening, so I don't want to be a dink about it and order 40% too much or something stupid like that.

I'm thinking this:

400 beer (that's about 5 per person assuming 75 people are drinking beer)
Two 40oz bottles of the big 5 - whiskey, vodka, gin, dark rhum and white rhum (anything left over can be returned, if unopened)
4 or 5 cases of white and red wine, more white than red

Think I'm way off course? How much wine does the average person consume at something like this? (I obviously don't drink wine at all).

Any thoughts would be greatful. It's not much of a conundrum, just trying to sort things out.

R35

 

[Sandpiper3]

At my cousin's wedding two years ago, my 3 cousins and I drank about 5-6 glasses of wine each. Make sure to count for any underage (if you have any) drinkers to be slipping some of it hehe

 

[Rockford35]

There won't be any underage weiners at the reception, sorry dude.

R35

 

[Slingblade61]

I can't get over the fact that her parents appear to know about this AND are gonna pay for it......have they ever met you?

 

[SunnyDaze]

Congratulations on the wedding!

The LB store should actually be able to help you out better than we can. A lot of these things are regional. For example, where you are, people tend to drink a lot more than people do here at these events (free or not) (and I know from experience...). I think it was the main LB store that had someone on staff that could tell you what the standard amounts and types (liquors/beer/wine) should be. I'm not sure if they still do it (it sounds like they do from your note), but they used to take back unopened bottles too, so if you don't open them before they are needed you can get back some of your money if you buy too much. We used them for our wedding years ago, and they were pretty close.

Good luck!

 

[Rockford35]

I can't get over the fact that her parents appear to know about this AND are gonna pay for it......have they ever met you?

Ya, I don't get it either.

Sunny,

The Lb was my next step. I just thought there might be some liquor pigs here that would have some experience in this area. I'm pretty sure the boys at the LB can help me out.

Cheers guys,

R35

 

[warbirdlover]

Couldn't you buy half barrels of beer and keep on ice? Then if you didn't use some you could return them. Cheaper and better beer (tap).

Don't know a thing about wine.

 

[JEFF4i]

I think Rock, either way, they are going to regret that day.

 

[Pa Jayhawk]

Not sure if this helps, but over the holidays we had about 25-30 people over for about 2-3 hours for most and maybe 4-5 hours for a few. They were mainly wine drinkers. I bought 3 cases of beer, a case of wine, and just pulled out all of my liquor bottles from the cabinet. Bought some tonic, OJ, Cranberry Juice, Limes, Bottled water, Coke, Diet Coke, 7 up, and diet 7up. We likely went through 1 1/2 cases of beer (alot of which was probably me over the course of the entire day), 5 bottles of white, 2 bottles of red and maybe a combined total of a liter of hard liquor, mostly gin and vodka, a couple bottles of tonic. Most of the soda used was diet, and specifically diet coke. Most of the other soda was untouched. Funny part was, everyone brought wine as a gift so we finish with probably a case and a half of wine.

Funny because I assumed people would prefer red to white on the wine so I bought 7 red and 5 white.

I pretty much just bought stuff I knew my wife and I would use over the course of time. I also figured if I ran out of something, which didn't happen, people would likely just find the next best thing a be happy.

edit 1 - Oh yeah, don't forget Triple Sec. Alot of the common drinks call for this.

 

[Bravo]

I think your estimates are good with one exception. I'd increase the number of hard liquor bottles from 2-3...have the bartender keep the unopened bottles under the table and you can return them if you don't use them...