Open Bar Calculations

I have no clue myself. I'm pretty sure there are 'drink calculators' if you search on google. Sorry I can't be more help

Evite has a drink calculator that may help.

Evite wouldn't calculate for me, but I found one on BevMo.com:

http://www.bevmo.com/Misc/PartyPlanner.aspx

This says 5 drinks per person. Hmm

Does this include a cocktail hour? If so, I would guesstimate each of the 90 guests drinking 3 beers and 2 drinks. That would be $19/guest which gives you a grand total of $1,710 which I would round up to an even $1,800. But that's me.

We budgeted for a lot of wine and didn't get through it all. I actually don't even remember how much we had left, but it didn't seem like people drank as much as I anticipated.

I think I read 2 drinks per person for the first hour, and then 1 drink per hour after that. If you have heavy drinkers (like we do!) you might want to calculate 6-7 drinks per person. Also though, you might have some that won't drink at all (elderly, children, designated drivers, pregnant women...), so you might still be able to do 5 per person depending on your crowd.

Depends on your guests and if they are heavy drinkers. I went to a site where I could put in light moderate and heavy. However, what I did was used the max dollar amount for drinks and went by that. In my case we can bring our own beer and wine. So I know that the case of beer FH likes is about 8 dollars (which is 6 beers and plenty for him) the wine I like is about the same price which gets me pretty drunk (It's a good sized bottle). Logically, we know not every guest would drink the max. So in my case we multiplied 8 by how many guests old enough to drink. Now in your case you will need to do it by price of drink/hour/and guest count. I would estimate about 6 drinks max per person for a normal 4/5 hr reception) by the max amount of the drinks with that it comes to $2,700. I however, I like to over estimate I honestly wouldn't budget lower than $2,100 if you do have a lot of drinkers (which is 50 of your guests drinking beers and 40 drinking cocktails).

Thanks for the feedback!

Our venue suggested we estimate 1 drink per person per hour and used the higher drink price. We also used our entire guest count rather than going through and look at who we know drinks and who doesn't just to get a rough estimate. For your situation I'd assume 4 drinks per person at $5 per drink x 100 guests or roughly $2,000. Some people will have more than 4 drinks, some will have less and some won't drink.

Agree with Amy. Open bar is free reign for some people. If I was a guest with a 4 hour open bar, I'd say I would drink at least 2 drinks per hour. The heavy drinkers I know would drink more.

The food and beverage manager at the hotel where FH works told us the formula he uses is 65% of your guests will consume 4-5 drinks over a 4 hr period. I think it also depends on your crowd. My side of the family is Southern Baptist and the vast majority don't drink. If both sides of your family drink then you might want to up the percentage.