Wedding Alcohol Estimator

Background

Info taken from this site. Three step process for calculating what you need to purchase for a modified full bar:

1. Figure Out How Long Your Wedding Reception/Cocktail Hour Will Be
2. Figure Out How Many Drinks Come in a Bottle You are Serving
3. Decide What You Want Your Alcohol Mix to Be

There are other assumptions that you can build into the model such as the rate of drink consumption, and whether you will have a signature cocktail and/or a champagne toast.

Modified full bar

Wine

One bottle is approximately four servings at six ounces per serving. Need at least one red wine and one white:

• Red:
• White:

Beer

One bottle is one serving. It is nice to select at least two types of beer (one dark or strong, one light) to provide options.

• Strong: Lagunitas IPA
• Light: Modelo or Pacifico

Liquor

One bottle is approximately 14-18 servings depending on the bartender. You’d want 2-3 options with mixers and garnishes.

• Liquor:
  • Tequila
  • Gin
  • Whiskey
• Mixers:
  • Tonic
  • Club soda
  • Coke / Diet Coke
  • Orange juice
    
• Garnishes:
  • Lime
  • Lemon
  • Salt

Bubbles

If you’re going to serve bubbles as a toasting-only option, you want about 4–5 ounces per person, per toast.

Signature cocktail

If you are doing a signature cocktail, subtract one hour from your calculations. During cocktail hour, assume everyone’s drink will be the signature one, and make sure there’s enough for everyone to have it.

Model

First, we need to calculate how many drinks per hour we think our guests will consume. There are different assumptions that we can make. For example,

• Assume guests will have two drinks in the first hour of the open bar, and one additional drink each following hour.
• Assume one serving per person per hour

Our model will be able to simulate these different types of consumption rates to get a total number of drinks/servings we need to purchase.

Second, we have to calculate how many drinks come in each type of bottle that we are serving. Again, there are different assumptions we can make that largely depend on how much the bartenders will pour for each drink.

I scraped these estimates for the number of drinks per bottle for different kinds of alcohol from https://vinepair.com/articles/how-many-drinks-per-bottle/.

The final piece of information that we need the distribution of types of alcohol for our guests. Some different assumptions on the web are:

• sites like Total Wine encourage you to use a ratio of 50% wine drinkers, 30% beer, and 20% spirit
• 50% of guests want wine, 25% beer, and 25% want the hard stuff

Simulation

## Define your assumptions 
hours_serving <- 6
is_sig_cocktail <- "yes"
is_champagne_toast <- "yes"
n_guests <- 160
prop_wine <- 0.33
prop_beer <- 0.33
prop_liquor <- 0.33
assumed_consumption_rate <- 1

prop_alc_types = list(wine = prop_wine, beer = prop_beer, liquor = prop_liquor) 

servings_per_bottle = list(wine = d_servings$number_of_drinks[1], 
                           beer = d_servings$number_of_drinks[9],
                           liquor = d_servings$number_of_drinks[4])

## run the simulation
get_ndrinks_by_type(length_wedding = hours_serving, 
                    n_guests = n_guests, 
                    champagne_toast = is_champagne_toast,
                    servings_champagne_bottle = 5,
                    sig_cocktail = is_sig_cocktail,
                    prop_alc_types = prop_alc_types,
                    servings_per_bottle = servings_per_bottle) %>% 
  as_tibble() %>% 
  knitr::kable(caption = "Number of bottles to purchase")

Number of bottles to purchase

wine	beer	liquor	champagne
53	264	7	32