If you are planning a wedding or other event that has a bar, you need to figure out how many glasses you will need for the entire night.  Below is the calculation we use at Loanables to help our customers.

First calculate how many drinks will be served.

You should assume that each guest will have one drink per hour.  Yes, I know some will have more, but some will also have less.  Unless your party is mostly college students, this formula works:

Total number of guests X the length (in hours of the party) = the total number of drinks

So, if you are expecting 500 guests for 4 hours, you should plan on 2000 drinks being served.

Next, calculate how much beer will be served.

Forty percent of all drinks are beer.

In our example above, 2000 drinks x 40% = 800.

I recommend serving beer in the bottles so you don’t have to rent and/or clean all of these glasses. But, if you are getting a keg, plan for 800 pilsner glasses or beer mugs.

Third, calculate how much wine will be served?

Sixty percent of the remaining drinks will be wine.

We will serve a total of 2000 drinks, but 800 of those will be beer.  That leaves 1200 drinks, of which 60% will be wine.  (1200 x 60% = 720). In this example, we need 720 wine glasses.

Last, calculate how many all purpose glasses you need.

The remaining glasses will be all purposes glasses. In our example, we needed a total of 1200 glasses. We got 720 wine glasses so we need 480 all purposes glasses.

I recommend rocks glasses.  These can be used for non-alcoholic and specialty drinks.  This is the most economical way to go as almost all rental companies have this glass.

Do you have staff cleaning glasses during the event?

If so reduce all counts by 25%.

Here are our totals for our 500 person party:

Beer Glasses (unless serving in bottles): 800

Wine Glasses: 720

All Purpose Glasses: 480

If you need help figuring out your specific needs or have questions, email us at info@reventals.com.

Next: check out this blog to find out how much alcohol you should buy.