Top Tips For Providing Drinks

If you want to provide some drinks for your guests, creating your own wedding cocktail or having a brewery make a special batch for your day is a great touch for your guests. If you’re on a budget, give each guest one free drink each. It’s a great way to get people started and everyone will love to be able to sample your signature drinks. Try buying some poker tokens and pop one on the place settings – it’s like an extra little favour.

Make ‘brew your own beer’ part of the groom’s stag celebrations. Every man wants to try his hand at brewing beer, so having your groom take along some friends or his best man to come up with a brilliant brew for your big day is a great idea, and his friends will all love getting to have some on the day! Or, if you are both beer lovers, have this as a stress-relieving activity to do mid-wedding planning so you can both enjoy it. Nutbrook Priory, based in Derbyshire, has packages starting at £265, which includes a full 5-6 hour day where your design and craft your own beer, and end with 72 bottles of personalised beer ready for your day. If you brew your own beer, you could keep a few bottles aside for keepsakes. Get a couple of bottles out on your first anniversary and toast to getting through your first year!

Similarly, have cocktail tasting as part of your hen do. Get together lots of different recipes, spirits, fruits and mixers and get testing. Come up with a few different mixes that you love, and then try and think of some funny names. You will have a blast and it will be one thing to tick off the to do list. Everyone loves a good cocktail making!

If you want to provide some alcohol, a great way to do this is to have just a couple different types of drinks. Mr and Mrs drinks are not only cute, but also a lovely way to share your favourite drinks with everyone else. This way, you can buy the spirits and other ingredients in bulk, and once it’s gone – its gone! Try having a sign like this one to draw your guest’s eyes and will act as a great keepsake.

If you are planning an open bar, there is a lot of help on the internet to help you calculate what youll need to buy. A great example is http://weddingdrinks.co.uk/ – which is put together by wedding coordinators, to give you a rough guide to how much they think you will need. It gives you the option to add how many guests, how many of those are heavy drinkers/drivers and how many arrival drinks you’ll give – as well as more. A good figure to start on is to provide each guest 1 drink per hour – some people will have more than this, others will have less, but it’s a good start. 1 keg of beer serves around 165 people, 1 standard size bottle of spirits serves 18 people and 1 bottle of wine serves 4 people. Remember to provide some soft drinks for the non-drinkers too!