Average Open Bar Price

It's hard to compare prices, ours are per drink. At our venue (Denver) an open beer & wine bar is $34 per person for 5 hours. Full open is $42 per person.

Ours is via our venue at $16 per person for well and domestic beer, house wine, which I think is an awesome price (3 hours, 50 ppl)

Also, does that price include the bartender(s)?

That's less than $13 a person, which honestly is pretty good!

Also, I think their estimate on coke mixers is too low. 70r cans for 200 ppl? Also, no iced tea for mixers? I'd ask if they could do 2L bottles of mixers.

Are you allowing shots @ your open bar, no shot glasses listed also.

(hope this is helpful!)

You might need liability insurance of some type if you the DIY route in case someone has too much and drives. Usually when you hire a company they have that insurance are are responsible if something happens due to being over served.

I think that seems like a great deal! I definitely did NOT want to DIY a bar (too much work, liability, guesswork on quantities, etc) so I found a venue that did it all for me. I paid around $4k for approx 155 adults for alcohol. It was a consumption bar that was open for 7 or so hours.

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Yeah I know, we have a different bar tending service we already hired through the venue. They just don't supply any alcohol.

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Yes too much guesswork for me! Glad it worked out for you, I might be going this route too.

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We hired bartenders through the venue.

$13 pp does sound really good actually lol If you think that's low I might add more then, she said we can return what hasn't been used. We also are getting iced tea from our food caterer!

& Yes we'll probably allow shots, good question to ask to add on. Thank you!!

The price itself is not bad. You’re looking at $13 per person if round up with tax, delivery and all included. Not bad.
Now I’ll ask about the quantities. What if your group tents to lean more towards an specific drink and you run out of it but there’s plenty of the rest. What would happened? Do you get an extra charge? To me open bar is full open bar and the vendor should be able to calculate to have alcohol for everyone and more if need it. I’ll ask this.

If it helps I’m paying $35 per person for premium open bar. I do not have a chart like this. I only know what alcohol are being used and mixers but no quantities.

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Also, the liability insurance can be SO expensive, just getting it here for a wedding I am coordinating in Aug, is over $500 for like 5 or 6 hours of an open bar.

View Quoted Comment I did this same thing.. it probably doesn’t help much but our consumption bar was 6,500ish for 6 hours with 180 people !

View Quoted Comment This- that per person rate sounds great, but I’d question quantities and make sure it’s really enough

It's really hard to know how much people will drink...however that looks like a pretty good deal. What I would do (because I'm compulsive like this) is actually go through the list and actually compare each price alcohol to what you would buy in store to what their prices are. If it's around the same, you might as well have them supply it for you.

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Our venue does it like this also. But I broke it down, and it seems to be a similar price. I calculated about $2500, and that's close to what her total is at the bottom of that page. I'm in the SF Bay Area. I like hearing what others are paying, as it makes me not freak out so much about our costs! Looks like a lot of people are paying about the same amount for booze.

Kodi, for 200 guests, this seems like a very reasonable price. Especially if they will credit you for anything unused! I'm paying about that same amount (in the SF Bay Area), but I only have half your guests!

I am having an open bar, we decided to go with a company the just provides the bartenders. We found it cheaper to purchased all wine, beer and liquor ourselves. We have a budget of $700 for that, and we used https://www.evite.com/pages/party/drink-calculator to find out how much of everything we would need. We are purchasing from Sam's Club and they have buy back options.