Bride Blogger Nicole

Deciding what to provide for alcohol at our wedding reception has been a little tough. We always have known that we would like to provide free beer for our guests at the reception, but deciding what else to provide has been tricky. I wanted to do something fun and different, but couldn't decide what exactly.

Originally, my future father-in-law wanted to serve whiskey shots at the door. :) He is Polish, so maybe it's a Polish tradition; I'm not sure? However, we decided that maybe whiskey shots weren't the best choice and thought we could come up with a signature drink, something simple that we could match to our wedding colors.

So I went online and looked for recipes for purple drinks. I found one that was vodka, blueberry juice, and cranberry juice. That sounded pretty good to me, so I went to the store and got the ingredients and Ryan and I tried it one night.

It was good, but it was a little thick, so we decided to add some 7UP for a little fizz, and that was much better. The color wasn't exactly purple, but it was close enough, so we decided we would serve that at the door instead of the whiskey shots.

Then we had a meeting with Rick at the Grand Manse to see what our options were as far as making the drink. It turned out that we could bring in the juices; they would provide the vodka and 7UP and we would pay for however many drinks they made up. Then he told us that not many people drink the signature drink at weddings. So if we had them make up 150 drinks and only 5 people drank it, we would have wasted a lot of money.

So, Rick's suggestion was to just do the simple beer and wine, and then maybe hand out some drink tickets if we wanted to give some to our wedding party, or whoever. That's what we decided to go with. I really would like to have something fun and different, but I don't want to spend money on it if it's not going to get used. Plus, it's much simpler to have the Grand Manse take care of getting the alcohol, instead of our having to make sure we get enough juice, and so forth. I'm glad Rick was honest with us and told us that it would be a waste of money to do the signature drink, and that it would be a better value for us to just do the beer and wine.

-Nicole