How much alcohol to purchase for the wedding reception?

Wedding Tools

Jan 17

If you’ve ever wondered how much alcohol to purchase for the wedding, it’s sort of vague when it comes to a Google search.

In fact, the search results can vary based on several factors like how many people are going to attend the wedding reception, how long the reception is going to be, and your overall budget.

And that’s a problem.

To solve this, we’ve developed an easy to use, online wedding reception alcohol calculator to help you easily figure out what you need to purchase, give it a try below.

The idea is simple, just put in the number of guests you will be having, how long your reception will last and then spread out the beer, wine and spirits based on what you want, having them equal 100%.

For example, we setup this to show wine at 50% to start, beer at 40% and spirits at 10%.

Using the sliders to make adjustments (and making sure everything equals 100%) the calculator should give you an approximate amount of bottles of beer, wine and spirits to drink.

How much should we budget for each category of drinks?

Well, Carole and I happen to actually have some great data on that from a 2014 wedding survey we did.

We asked 1,244 wedding couples all across the nation which was their preferred drink of choice and the results came back pretty standard from our point of view.

Overwhelmingly, 71% of couples said they wanted mostly wine, 24% said they mostly wanted beer and just about 5% said they wanted spirits as the main drink of choice.

When we asked the same couples if it was the ONLY choice during the wedding reception, just about 91% said no, they’d like to have more than just the one type to offer couples.

Main Drink Type at Wedding Reception

What We Recommend

While we aren’t professionals in the drinking department, we are professionals in the wedding expert department. When purchasing beverages for the reception, it’s best to just ask people what they’d like to drink.

If Bud Light is everyone’s favorite drink, plan on buying that as the main choice for the evening, thats a no brainier. But, if you don’t know the answer to your question, plan on having a fairly generic type of beer or wine.

Wines

If you don’t know much about wine, we can tell you that younger people tend to enjoy the more fruity, sweet wines and older people (such as ourselves) prefer drier, more bold wines.

Having a good mix of both in red and whites is ideal if you have a big spread of people attending the reception.

Also, if you’re wedding is close to a winery, we suggest asking a couple of local wineries about getting cases at a discount for your wedding. (you know, helping out the local business)

Spirits

Since this is the least popular, we suggest that you stick with 3-4 kinds of booze, bourbon is a great choice and you can never go wrong with that, rum is also very popular and so is tequila.

No matter what you wind up choosing, try to have at least 3/4 styles to let people try different things.

Beers

Also with beer, you basically have a couple of options, large companies or small.

We like to have smaller companies for wedding receptions because IPA and local brewers are big trends in 2020 for weddings and again it’s about having local business represent you at the reception, but it also bring an element of uniqueness to your wedding.

Sure, you can always get some cases of the everyday beer that lots of people drink, but if you can find a local brewery or two, give them a try before you purchase and even talk to the people on staff at the breweries too, many offer discounts for weddings.