Wedding booze on a budget

Weddings are a time to celebrate! It’s a time for overflowing Veuve Clicquot! As much fun as it would be to forget about your income and your bills and have everyone fill their glasses with Cristal for the night, your alcohol budget for wedding will likely preventing that from being an option. You have to be realistic.

Here are a few wedding bar ideas to keep your wedding crowd tipsy for less:

1. PABST BLUE RIBBON

Blue-collar guys, college bros, hipsters, basically everyone loves PBR, and for a good reason – it tastes decent enough, and it’s insanely cheap.

People think Bud Light is cheap. In most towns, PBR is about half the price of Bud Light. Now that’s cheap.

PBR is more affordable than Bud Light, and it’s a better beer, too. You don’t have to take our word for it: just compare PBR’s score (https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/447/1331/) of 70 on BeerAdvocate to Bud Light’s score (https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/29/1320/) of 48. The people have spoken.

2. TRADER JOE’S TWO-BUCK CHUCK

Health food stores have a reputation for being more expensive than their big box superstore counterparts, but Trader Joe’s Charles Shaw wine comes in at a price that you won’t find anywhere else. The wine used to come in at $2, hence Two-Buck Chuck, but even Three-Buck Chuck is a deal no one can beat.

The real beauty of Charles Shaw isn’t that it comes in at less than $3 a bottle, it’s that wine enthusiasts can’t even tell the difference between it and a higher-end $50 bottle. Charles Shaw regularly beats out the more expensive competition in wine tastings. Sometimes you don’t have to sacrifice quality for price.

3. MAKE A CUSTOM MIXED DRINK

Order a mixed drink at a bar, and you’ll find that it’s worth more per ounce than gold, but getting the ingredients and making mixed drinks yourself is a sure-fire way to save money.

It’s all about the presentation. Here’s the trick: it doesn’t matter how inexpensive the ingredients are if the drinks are coming out of something charming and taste great.

No one’s (probably) going to know you’re using $15-a-handle store brand liquor when there’s no bottle for them to see. You can use inexpensive fruit juices too; no one’s going to see those bottles either. Just make sure the final concoction is tasty.

To save a lot of money, you can make rum-based mixed drinks using Bacardi 151. A 750 ml bottle of Bacardi 151 is going to run you around $25, which is about middle-of-the-road for a bottle of liquor that size.

So what make Bacardi 151 worthy of making this bar-on-a-budget list? Well, just take a look at the ABV… it’s named 151 for a reason. At 75.5% alcohol (151 proof), a little splash of Bacardi 151 goes a long way, as it’s twice as powerful as your average liquor.

For an extra (yet still affordable) touch of class, cut up some fresh fruit and put the slices in the dispensers. That’ll further mask how affordable the contents are, and it’ll add a kick of flavor, too.