A practical guide to wedding drinks, staffing and bar planning from the Serve team.

Planning a DIY wedding bar can be one of the most fun parts of organising your day. Your favourite cocktails, local wine, a great atmosphere around the bar. Done right, it can become a really great focal point for guests!

But it’s also one of the areas couples underestimate the most.

Behind every smooth running bar there’s quite A LOT happening in the background. Ice deliveries, glassware, stock levels, bar layout, staffing, and making sure nobody is waiting 20 minutes for a drink…

After working at hundreds of weddings across the South West, we’ve seen exactly what works and what can go really wrong! So if you’re planning a DIY bar, here are a few things to think about before the big day.

First Things First: What Kind of Bar Do You Want?

Before you start buying alcohol, it helps to decide what style of bar you actually want for your wedding.

This might sound obvious, but the type of drinks service you choose has a big impact on how much stock you’ll need, how the bar is set up, and how many staff are required to keep things running smoothly.

Here are some of the most common options we see at weddings.

Wine, beer, spirits and mixers available all evening.
This is the most flexible option for guests, but it does need a well organised setup and experienced staff. Once the evening starts, things can get busy very quickly, so having enough hands behind the bar makes a big difference.
Usually wine, beer and one or two simple spirits such as gin and tonic or rum and coke.
This option is slightly easier to manage because the drinks menu is smaller, which means service can move much faster. It also makes stocking the bar simpler and helps keep costs under control.
Even with a limited drinks menu, having trained bar staff makes a big difference to how quickly guests are served.
Two or three signature cocktails alongside a smaller drinks menu.
Cocktail bars look amazing and add a real “wow” moment, but they do take longer to serve. Keeping the menu simple and having experienced bar staff is key here.
Batching cocktails in advance is also a great way to speed things up.

If you’re planning cocktails, keep the menu simple!

Two or three options is usually perfect. It gives guests choice while still allowing the bar team to keep service fast and consistent.

And if you're planning a DIY bar, remember that the drinks menu, bar layout and staffing all work together. Getting that balance right is what makes a wedding bar feel effortless for your guests.

We previously wrote a blog on the best batch cocktails which you can check out here!

The Question Everyone Asks: How Much Alcohol Do You Actually Need?

This is usually where couples start to second guess everything!

A good starting point based on what we typically see:

Drinks reception
1 to 2 drinks per guest

Dinner
Half a bottle of wine per person

Evening party
4 to 5 drinks per guest

Glassware: The Bit Couples Almost Always Underestimate

Glassware is one of those wedding bar details that sounds simple on paper, but can get surprisingly complicated once you start listing everything out.

Our advice is always to start with your drinks offering and work backwards from there. Before ordering anything, write down exactly what you’re serving throughout the day, from welcome drinks and table wine through to the evening bar.

Where you can, it’s usually best to keep the different types of glasses to a minimum. The more variety you introduce, the more difficult it becomes to work out quantities, manage returns and keep service running smoothly.

Versatility is key. You may need:

flutes for Prosecco
pint glasses for beers
martini glasses for cocktails

But where possible, think about whether one style of glass can work across multiple drinks. Highballs are a great example because they’re versatile and can be used for everything from cocktails and spirits with mixers to half pints and soft drinks.

This not only makes things easier to plan, it also makes life much simpler on the day for both your bar team and your hire company.

Calculate the number of glasses needed for each drink throughout the day.
Don’t just order by guest number and hope for the best. Think in stages:welcome drinks, table drinks, toasts and evening bar.
Your guests will not keep hold of their glasses.
This is the big one. Glasses get left on tables, put down in random places, abandoned on the lawn and swapped constantly. You will always need more than you think.
Keep your glass variety to a minimum.
The simpler the setup, the smoother the service.
Think ahead for the evening bar.
For later in the night, it can be really helpful to switch to bioplastic, paper or reusable festival-style cups. This can speed up service, reduce breakages and make collection much easier.

Recommended Glassware Quantities

If you’re planning your own bar, these are the quantities we generally recommend as a starting point.

Welcome Drinks

1.5 to 2 glasses per guest
Plus spare highballs for water and soft drinks.

Table Drinks

Water, wine and toasts
Plan for 1 glass per person, plus an extra 10%.

Evening Bar

4 to 5 glasses per person
And it’s always worth having a backup of bioplastics or reusable cups.

These numbers can vary depending on your drinks menu and guest list, but they’re a really useful guide when you’re starting to plan.

Choosing Your Supplier

The right hire supplier makes a HUGE difference, especially when you’re managing lots of moving parts already.

Abbotts Event Hire are forever our go-to for glassware, crockery, cutlery and barware hire across Devon and Cornwall. Their service is incredible, they offer brilliant variety, and delivery directly to venue makes the whole process much easier. A big bonus is their “goes back dirty” service too, which is worth its weight in gold after a wedding.

If you’re looking for something a little more unique or design-led, Out of the Ordinary Event Hire offer beautiful, more distinctive glassware options that can really help bring your style through on the table.

If there’s one thing we’d say here, it’s this:

glassware is not just a styling choice, it’s a service decision too.

The right quantities and the right mix of glasses will make your whole drinks service feel smoother, calmer and much easier to manage.

Ice: The One That Catches People Out

Ice is probably the most underestimated part of a DIY bar.

We’ve seen plenty of weddings where everything else is perfectly planned, but the bar slows down because there simply isn’t enough ice to keep up with demand.

As a general rule, we recommend around:

🧊 1kg of ice per guest 🧊

This covers cocktails, spirit mixers, chilling wine and keeping drinks cold throughout the day.

Don’t forget you need to think about where ice is coming from and equally where/how will you store it on the day!!

Bar Setup & Staffing: What Happens Behind the Scenes

A bar can look beautiful from the front, but if it doesn’t work behind the scenes, service will slow down very quickly!

This is where setup and staffing go hand in hand.

Things we always look out for:

enough space for people to move comfortably behind the bar
easy access to glassware and stock
clear areas for wine, cocktails and mixers
somewhere to store ice properly
bins and clearing points behind the bar

When a large number of guests arrive at once, these details make a noticeable difference. Without them, even a well stocked bar can quickly feel chaotic.

The same goes for the team behind it.

On paper, a DIY bar might seem manageable, but in reality there’s a lot happening at once. Serving drinks, restocking, collecting glasses, keeping things clean and maintaining a steady flow throughout the evening.

Friends and family often offer to help, but on the day they’ll naturally want to enjoy it too. Having a team in place who understand how a bar should run means everything feels more organised, and far less stressful.

It’s usually not about doing more, it’s about things running properly in the background so the day feels easy for everyone else.

If you’re planning a DIY wedding and want your bar to run smoothly from start to finish, we’d love to chat about how the Serve team can support you.

You can get in touch with the Serve team here: