Wedding drinks planning

How to achieve a slick, stress free day.

 

“Clink clink clink” you hear from across the room, as your distant and elderly relatives try to wonkily hold two glasses to a hand, a bottle of prosecco in the other, pouring ever so carefully and failing to avoid spilling on the floor. Your drinks reception is off to a chaotic start and you can hear the judgmental murmurings already.

You wake up in a sweat – “PHEW, just a nightmare”, you got lucky this time because you read our blog post on how to achieve a slick, stress free day when planning your wedding drinks! With all jokes aside, we would love to share with you our experience as a premium mobile drinks service company, who specialise in luxury & DIY weddings

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Set up a dedicated area for your drinks reception.

It’s not always best to have your drinks reception in the bar area of your venue because the purpose of this section is to allow your guests to mingle and feel comfortable. In most cases, a temporary set of dressed tables serving a limited range of drinks can be set up in a much more suitable area, like an entrance hall or even outdoors in the leafy gardens of your venue’s grounds.

Limit your guests to a few things at a time.

Lately, it has become more and more popular to stray away from the traditional wedding formats and timings, which has allowed for wonderfully exciting creativity! We are huge advocates for fun, but it is important not to ignore the responsibilities of managing a large crowd. We recommend splitting your day into chunks and having certain times allocated to certain things, this can sound a little bit controlling on paper but if you have no structure at all, on the day you will experience large volumes of people heading immediately to the bar and you will struggle to involve them in anything else for the remainder of the day.

•  A good way to mitigate this, is by having the bar closed, during the drinks reception at least. Which focuses attention on socialising with each other and away from getting too drunk too quickly. This is another good reason why it is best to hold your drinks reception away from the main bar area.
• Having a period of time when your guests sit down and are addressed for speeches, games and toasts etc, is very important to make everyone there feel properly involved in the day. This is integrated into the standard wedding format, but works really well for DIY weddings too.
• Don’t be shy regarding closing the bar for periods of time when you want people’s attention either, because fortunately or unfortunately, the default behaviour of a wedding guest who’s unsure of what’s going on, is usually to go and wait in the bar queue.

Hire a reputable bar team & wedding coordinator

The above may seem like a lot of rules and boundaries for you to try and enforce on the day, which is absolutely not the goal of this blog. The goal is for you to understand the standards and ideal formula for a successful and ENJOYABLE wedding. For this, you’ll need the help of a solid team around you & a good wedding coordinator can recommend their trusted suppliers, like mobile bar teams and photographers etc who help to manage the guests in sticking to your plan, all day while you relax.

*A good mobile bar company can offer full wedding packages that include;*
Drinks receptions (Staff, set up, glassware, drinks) Wedding breakfast service (Table wines, attentive staff, table glassware) & a solid evening bar service too (Mobile bar set ups, staff, glassware and a full range of drinks ranging from Margaritas to IPAs)

Take the professionals advice

They’re being paid to do what they do for a reason & it can be all too tempting to pull rank on what YOU want, regarding the placement of bars, timing of activities & food drink offerings. Trust me, the absolute NUMBER 1 priority for wedding suppliers is to please you and make sure you get the best possible outcome for your day, but in order for them to do that they have to push back on your ideal scenarios sometimes. The reality of having a ‘not for purpose’ bar in the middle of a dance floor in the shape of a heart, offering 10 different frozen daiquiri options, to a crowd of 250 people could end up being a disastrously slow, clunky, messy and un-satisfying experience for everyone involved. Having said that, nothing is impossible and with the right budget you can usually achieve your dreams, but be prepared to get that wallet out.

In summary then, it really pays to have some credible professionals onboard your wedding planning journey as they can really help relieve stress on the lead up and improve overall enjoyment and satisfaction on the big day.

The Swordmaker – Events & Cocktails, has delivered countless successful weddings and can help plan your big day & fulfil a second to none “On the day’ drinks service, all thanks to our fantastic team and amazing range of mobile bars.

Get in touch now & book a no obligation call to discuss your options!