The Open Bar Question: How much does it REALLY cost?

We were allowed to provide our own alcohol, for 120 people our bill was roughly $1750 without mixers (that is included in our catering pp budget).

Well you can't make guests pay for their drinks so why not limit it to beer and wine? At least it's cheaper than liquor?

We are hiring the bartender from our favorite happy hour spot. He always creates drinks for me and they're always amazing so we decided to ask. He will be $150 + tips and then we will buy all of our own alcohol. We plan to do beer/wine and then some of your standards (rum/coke, vodka/tonic etc.) with signature cocktails.

Our venue has talked us through several options. We have about $1000 for 135 people (we hope). We looked at drink tickets for $7 per person, or consumption and hoping $1000 made it through cocktail hour for about a drink per person, but our venue just told us our best bet for $1000 is 1 keg of beer (about 160 drinks) for $425 and then spend the rest on wine, which amounted to 18.5 bottles for $575. We're rounding up to 20 bottles, which will get us about 80 more drinks, so about 240 total -- definitely a better deal than drink tickets!

We will have around 80-85 guests at our wedding and are estimating about 10-15 won't be drinking either because they don't drink or they are the DD for their party. We have budgeted $3500 which includes a cocktail hour. Some of the things we planned that are big money savers:

- During cocktail hour, only our signature drinks can be ordered

- No shots allowed at any point of the wedding

- We've limited the alcohol choices (i.e. instead of offering Jack Daniel's we are offering a Colorado whiskey which is a tier lower than JD)

- No tequila and only one type of each alcohol so people don't automatically choose the "premium" option

I've learned that it's the little things that make a huge different budget wise. Good luck!

Our open bar is 5200$ for 150-160 people for 5 hours.

Not sure about the beer cost, but my brother was trying to help me with this and he suggested I get liquor bottles from Costco. He spent $500 on bottles and had a bunch left over, so he ended up taking them back and getting some money back for them!
Great tip and I’m stealing it for my wedding!

Mine was about $4k for the Open bar for 90 people. We got every dime out that bad boy too! 🤣

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For how many people?

This makes me happy to only be featuring a few signature drinks and then have it BYOB