Wedding drink calculator
How much alcohol to buy, as a list you can hand to a retailer. Guest count and bar hours in, bottles out.
504
drinks across the night
84 of your 120 guests drinking, two in the first hour and one an hour after that.
What to order
- Wine51 bottles
- Beer152 bottlesabout 7 cases of 24
- Spirits7 bottles750ml, 16 drinks each
- Sparkling for the toastOne flute each, everyone standing there20 bottles
A flat one drink per guest per hour would have told you 600. It counts guests who are not drinking and misses how hard the first hour goes, which is why it lands in the wrong place in both directions at once. Round up on every line above and take the unopened bottles back.
The bar is ordered. Now seat the 120.
Build the seating, print one QR code, and let guests find their own table on the day. Your first event is free through 250 guests.
Start a seating planWhere these numbers come from
Two of them are physical facts. A 750ml bottle is 25.4 fluid ounces, so it holds 5 glasses of wine at a 5oz pour, 6 flutes at the 4oz pour a toast is served at, and 16 drinks at a 1.5oz measure. Those do not vary.
The rest is an assumption, and we would rather say so than dress it up. How much of your guest list drinks at all is the input that moves the answer most, and you are the only person who knows whether your room is half children and drivers or entirely not. That is why it is a setting on the calculator rather than a constant buried in it.
One thing we will not do is claim these are our own figures. Elsewhere on this site, the table calculator cites real occupancy from events actually run here, because we seat guests and can count them. We have never poured for them. Anyone quoting a precise measured average for how much a wedding drinks is quoting somebody else, or nobody.
Common questions
- How much alcohol do I need for 100 guests?
- For a five hour bar at 100 guests, assume about 70 of them drink, and about six drinks each across the night: roughly 420 drinks. On a wine, beer and spirits bar that is around 42 bottles of wine, 126 bottles of beer and 6 bottles of spirits, plus 17 bottles of sparkling if there is a toast. Order the top of that range rather than the bottom.
- How many glasses of champagne are in a bottle?
- Six flutes at the 4oz pour a toast is served at, from a standard 750ml bottle. That is the number to divide your guest list by: 6 flutes a bottle, one flute for everyone in the room including the guests who do not drink at the bar. A bottle gives five glasses rather than six if it is being poured as a drink rather than a toast.
- How many glasses of wine are in a bottle?
- Five, at a standard 5oz pour. A 750ml bottle is 25.4 fluid ounces, so 5 glasses is the arithmetic and it is also what a venue counts on. Free-pouring at a self-service table gets you four, which is the gap that empties a bar early.
- Why not just count one drink per guest per hour?
- Because it is wrong in two directions at once and they do not cancel. It counts guests who drink nothing at all, which on a wedding with children and drivers can be a third of the room, and it flattens the first hour, where people drink about 2 while the couple are away having photographs taken and the bar is the only thing happening.
- Should I buy more than the calculator says?
- Yes, round every line up, which this calculator already does. Running dry at ten o clock is the thing a host remembers for years; a spare case is a problem that solves itself. Any retailer worth using for a wedding order will take back what you do not open, so agree that before you buy rather than after.
- Does this work for a party rather than a wedding?
- Yes. Set the toast line aside, pick the crowd setting that matches the room, and the rest is the same arithmetic. A birthday or an office party is usually a heavier crowd over fewer hours than a wedding, which is the combination that catches people out.
The bar order depends on your guest count, and so does everything else. Work out how many tables you need from the same list, then draw the room and seat it in the browser, with no account and nothing to install. Guests then find their own table by scanning one QR code on the day.
Everything else a host has to settle before the day is in the printable seating planning kit: table capacities, the day-of checks and how to prepare place cards.