essentials 101
Once you have the liquid part of your bar covered, you have a few more essentials to tackle before your bar is fully stocked and ready to go. Regardless of whether you’re throwing backyard barbecue or a black tie dinner, the elements remain the same:
Ice for cocktails and chilling wine, beer and champagne
Proper glassware for the cocktails you are serving
Cocktail napkins
The basic calculations give you a solid starting point for your shopping list. We’ve done these calculations countless times over our 22 years of event production. However, you have to remember, the calculations yield a general estimate. There will be specific details of your party that directly affect the quantities you need.
Let’s Talk About Ice
Consider the location and weather for your party.
Is the event outside on a hot summer night? If the answer is yes, your ice will melt faster. You will want to add quite a bit of ice to the basic estimate. Ice is inexpensive, so better safe than sorry!
Think through how you will chill beer, white wine, champagne, hard seltzers, water, and any other liquor or beverages that needs to be served cold.
Are your ice chests or drink tubs HUGE? Are you the proud owner of a YETI Tundra 350 cooler? It holds 360 pounds of ice. That’s an extreme example, but you get the idea. You don’t want a huge cooler or trough with a sad little layer of ice at the bottom. Buy more ice!
You’ll Need a Glass for That
Look at your drink list for the party and decide which glassware styles you will need. Many cocktails can be served in the same style of glass.
90% of our events will only need two or three different glasses: a wine glass, a double old-fashioned glass, and sometimes a high ball. We typically choose a 16 or 18 ounce wine glass for the bartender to use for all wine options. A double old-fashioned glass works for most alcoholic cocktails and non-alcoholic drinks, from Margaritas to Palomas to water. We will throw in a highball glass from time to time for specialty cocktails or as a different glass for non-alcoholic choices like soda or Topo Chico.
If you are serving some cocktails that require a specific glass, you will want to estimate how many of your guests love that specific cocktail.
This can feel tricky if you don’t know your crowd well, for instance if you’re hosting a company party vs. your best friends. Don’t sweat it though. If worse comes to worse, they’ll drink their martini out of a double old-fashioned or champagne out of a wine glass. The glasses we look at adding onto the basics mentioned above are champagne flutes, martini glasses, and various sizes of wine glasses. If you’re hosting a wine tasting dinner with three distinctly different red wines for a table of wine connoisseurs, you might want the wine glass capacity suggested for each wine. Generally speaking, the capacity of the wine glasses from more ounces to fewer are full-bodied red wine, medium- to light-bodied red, white wine, then dessert wine.
You Can Call Me Bev Nap
We can’t even tell you the number of times the question comes up at events. Do you have any bev naps? Beverage napkins, aka cocktail napkins, are the tiny, often forgotten essential of the stocked bar. Almost every cocktail you’ll serve at your bar will have condensation on the glass if it’s chilled or has ice. You can either wipe the wetness discreetly on your clothing or if you have a properly stocked bar, use the napkin. Even if there’s no condensation, like with red wine, it feels good to have the cocktail napkin. It’s like your own little party woobie blanket.
