Wedding alcohol calculator
100 guests at a 5-hour reception need 500 drinks: with a 30/50/20 mix that is 150 beers, 50 bottles of wine and 7 of liquor. Walk into the liquor store with a list, not a guess. Free in your browser.
- Free
- Runs in your browser
- No sign-up
- Your data stays on your device
Run — free
Worked example
- Guests
- 100
- Hours
- 5
- Beer pct
- 30
- Wine pct
- 50
- Liquor pct
- 20
- Drinks per hour
- 1
- Total drinks
- 500
- Beer drinks
- 150
- Wine drinks
- 250
Planning the open bar for a wedding starts with three numbers: how many guests will drink, how many hours the reception lasts, and how the drink mix splits among beer, wine, and liquor. Couples, planners, and venue coordinators need a bottle shopping list before they call the liquor store, not a cocktail recipe and not a punch scale. This wedding alcohol calculator multiplies a positive integer guest count by event hours and drinks per guest per hour, splits the resulting drink pool by the beer, wine, and liquor percentages, and ceilings each category to whole bottles using five glasses per wine bottle, sixteen shots per liquor bottle, and one twelve-ounce bottle per beer.
How guests, hours, and drink mix become bottle counts
A wedding open bar is a coverage problem: you need enough drinks for every guest across every hour of the reception, and retailers sell whole bottles, not loose glasses. One hundred guests at a five-hour reception with the default rate need five hundred drinks. A classic wedding mix of thirty percent beer, fifty percent wine, and twenty percent liquor assigns one hundred fifty beers, two hundred fifty glasses of wine, and one hundred liquor servings.
Beer converts one-to-one into twelve-ounce bottles or cans. Wine uses five five-ounce glasses per seven-hundred-fifty-millilitre bottle. Liquor uses sixteen one-and-a-half-ounce pours per seven-hundred-fifty-millilitre bottle.
Each category is rounded up with a ceiling so a fractional bottle still becomes a whole bottle on the shopping list. This method does not scale a punch recipe, does not compute alcohol by volume from original and final gravity, and does not count down the days to the ceremony; those are different search intents and different tools. What it guarantees is a deterministic bottle count so a couple, a planner, and a liquor-store order never disagree on how much beer, wine, and liquor to buy.
Where a wedding alcohol calculator earns its keep
Couples planning an open bar can turn an RSVP count and a reception length into a liquor-store list instead of guessing in a group chat. Wedding planners and venue coordinators keep a house mix—often fifty percent wine, thirty percent beer, twenty percent liquor—and only need the bottle counts to move when the headcount changes. Liquor retailers who advise brides and grooms can run the same numbers at the counter and print a shopping list that matches the couple’s planning app.
Hospitality classes teach banquet-bar math by showing that ceiling rounding is what the invoice does; a pure oracle lets students check homework without a spreadsheet. Prefer this capability when the question is how many bottles of beer, wine, and liquor to buy from guests, hours, and mix; use a punch-batch scaler when you are multiplying a bowl recipe, and use an alcohol-by-volume calculator when you are brewing.
FAQ
What happens if the guest count is not a positive integer?
Zero, negative, missing, and fractional headcounts cannot produce a real bottle order and are not billed.
How is the drink mix applied to beer, wine, and liquor?
Each percentage is a share of total drinks, not of bottles. A 30/50/20 mix on 500 drinks is 150 beers, 250 wine glasses, and 100 liquor pours, then each category is ceilinged to bottles.
How many servings are in a wine or liquor bottle?
A 750 ml wine bottle is five 5 oz glasses. A 750 ml liquor bottle is sixteen 1.5 oz pours. Beer is one 12 oz bottle or can per drink. These constants are returned on every success.
What if my guests drink more than one drink an hour?
The calculator starts from one drink per guest per hour, the usual open-bar planning rate. For a livelier crowd, raise it toward 1.5 or 2 and the bottle counts grow with it.
Can I plan a bar with only beer and wine?
Yes. Set the liquor share to zero and split the rest between beer and wine. The three percentages must always add up to 100, otherwise no bottle count is produced.
Related tools
For developers — API access
Everything on this page is available programmatically. This section is for teams who want to wire it into their own systems; everyone else can just use the tool above.
API endpoint
Prefer to automate it? One authenticated POST creates the task; the result comes back by webhook or a signed link. The same capability also runs here on the web, by email and from Telegram — and soon from our app too.
Call it from your stack
curl -X POST https://api.kit.forhosting.com/cook/wedding-alcohol \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $KIT_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"guests":100,"hours":5,"beer_pct":30,"wine_pct":50,"liquor_pct":20}'const res = await fetch("https://api.kit.forhosting.com/cook/wedding-alcohol", {
method: "POST",
headers: {
"Authorization": `Bearer ${process.env.KIT_KEY}`,
"Content-Type": "application/json"
},
body: JSON.stringify({
"guests": 100,
"hours": 5,
"beer_pct": 30,
"wine_pct": 50,
"liquor_pct": 20
})
});
const { task_id } = await res.json();import os, requests
res = requests.post(
"https://api.kit.forhosting.com/cook/wedding-alcohol",
headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {os.environ['KIT_KEY']}"},
json={
"guests": 100,
"hours": 5,
"beer_pct": 30,
"wine_pct": 50,
"liquor_pct": 20
},
)
task_id = res.json()["task_id"]<?php
$res = file_get_contents("https://api.kit.forhosting.com/cook/wedding-alcohol", false, stream_context_create([
"http" => [
"method" => "POST",
"header" => "Authorization: Bearer " . getenv("KIT_KEY") . "\r\nContent-Type: application/json",
"content" => '{"guests":100,"hours":5,"beer_pct":30,"wine_pct":50,"liquor_pct":20}',
],
]));
$task = json_decode($res, true);body := bytes.NewBufferString(`{"guests":100,"hours":5,"beer_pct":30,"wine_pct":50,"liquor_pct":20}`)
req, _ := http.NewRequest("POST", "https://api.kit.forhosting.com/cook/wedding-alcohol", body)
req.Header.Set("Authorization", "Bearer "+os.Getenv("KIT_KEY"))
req.Header.Set("Content-Type", "application/json")
res, _ := http.DefaultClient.Do(req)Example request
{
"guests": 100,
"hours": 5,
"beer_pct": 30,
"wine_pct": 50,
"liquor_pct": 20
}Example response
{
"task_id": "tsk_a1b2c3d4e5f6a1b2c3d4e5f6",
"type": "cook.wedding_alcohol",
"status": "queued",
"_links": {
"result": "/tasks/tsk_…/result"
}
}The API is asynchronous: the call returns a task_id immediately and the result arrives by webhook. Polling is capped at 1 req/s per task.
Pricing
Published price — no tokens, no invented credits. A failed task is never charged.
Errors
| HTTP | Code | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
401 | unauthorized | Missing or invalid API key. |
402 | insufficient_balance | Your balance doesn't cover the task price. |
404 | unknown_type | That task type doesn't exist. |
429 | rate_limited | Too many requests. Use the webhook instead of polling. |
Technical notes
Guest counts that are not a positive integer fail with invalid_input, so a blank RSVP list cannot produce a fake order.
How guests, hours, and drink mix become bottle counts
Standard catering practice starts from one drink per guest per hour, which this calculator uses as drinks_per_hour unless you override it for a heavier or lighter crowd. Multiply a positive integer guest count by event hours and drinks_per_hour to obtain total_drinks, then split that pool by a drink mix of beer_pct, wine_pct, and liquor_pct that must sum to one hundred.
Input contract, response shape, and error behaviour
Non-positive hours, percentages outside zero to one hundred, and a mix that does not add to one hundred fail the same way. Formula and method strings plus a one-line English message support copy. Example: one hundred guests, five hours, thirty / fifty / twenty mix yields five hundred drinks, one hundred fifty beer bottles, fifty wine bottles, and seven liquor bottles. POST a JSON body with a required positive integer guests (aliases guest_count, people, headcount, party_size, n, rsvp), a required positive finite hours (aliases event_hours, duration, duration_hours, reception_hours), and three mix percentages beer_pct, wine_pct, and liquor_pct (aliases beer, wine, liquor and the matching percent and share names). Each percentage is a finite number from zero through one hundred inclusive, and the three must sum to one hundred within one hundredth of a point; a beer-and-wine reception sends liquor_pct zero. Optional drinks_per_hour (aliases dph, drinks, rate, drinks_per_guest_per_hour) defaults to one when omitted, matching the usual open-bar planning rate. Guest counts that are missing, zero, negative, fractional, or otherwise not a positive integer fail with invalid_input naming guests and are not billed. On success the body echoes the inputs, returns total_drinks as guests times hours times drinks_per_hour, returns the per-category drink counts after the mix split, and returns beer_bottles, wine_bottles, liquor_bottles, and total_bottles after ceiling. Serving constants wine_servings_per_bottle five, liquor_servings_per_bottle sixteen, and beer_servings_per_bottle one are included so a user interface can explain the conversion. Failed validation does not consume prepaid balance. Keep requests small, pin bottle counts in tests, and treat percentages as a mix that must add to one hundred—if you need a champagne toast, add those bottles outside this endpoint.
Where a wedding alcohol calculator earns its keep
Caterers and mobile bartenders can expose guests, hours, and three mix fields, call this parse endpoint, and fill a purchase order with beer_bottles, wine_bottles, and liquor_bottles. Always account for non-drinkers, a champagne toast, extra-thirsty dancing hours, and local serving laws in your own house rules—those sit outside the numeric scope of this endpoint but matter on the night.
Integration use cases
Couple shopping list for the open bar
Turn a confirmed RSVP count, reception hours, and a beer/wine/liquor mix into whole bottles to buy before the liquor-store run.
Planner and venue headcount changes
Keep a house mix (often 50/30/20 wine/beer/liquor) and recompute bottle counts whenever the guest list moves, without a spreadsheet.
Caterer and retailer purchase orders
Fill a purchase order with beer_bottles, wine_bottles, and liquor_bottles from the same deterministic formula the couple’s planning app uses.
Technical questions
How do I calculate how much alcohol to buy for a wedding?
Send a positive integer guests, positive hours, and a drink mix of beer_pct, wine_pct, and liquor_pct that sums to 100. The API returns whole bottle counts after splitting total_drinks = guests × hours × drinks_per_hour (default 1).
What does the wedding alcohol calculator cost?
The in-browser wedding alcohol calculator is free. Successful API calls are billed at $0.002 with unit item; a rejected guest count or mix is not billed.