When it comes to planning a party one of the hardest parts is to figure out how much food and drinks to buy. We don’t want them to end before the party is over but we also don’t want to have a bunch of left-overs. We have done quite a bit of research to create our Party Plan calculator hoping to help you get as close as possible to that magic number. We opted to round numbers up because we still believe it is better to have some to spare than to have to say to a guest “there’s no more beer”. But one factor that has quite a big impact on those calculations is the guests’ preferences. Let’s see an example:
I’m having a party next weekend and I’ll invite 10 drinking adults. I plan to offer beer and wine because that’s what they like. But maybe 7 of them will only drink beer while 3 prefer wine. When you know your guests more intimately, you can kind of predict that. In this case, the party plan results will probably not be as accurate for this occasion. That is because in this version of the calculator, if I select Beer and Wine, results will consider a 50%-50% distribution. That would mean we would assume that half of my guests will drink beer and the other half will drink wine. So there’s a big chance I’ll have lots of wine bottles left and not enough beer.
We know this is not ideal and it’s certainly an improvement that we will implement as soon as possible. But in order to start helping you out with those party calculations, we had to simplify things and consider average distribution ratios for the different types of drink. So just keep that in mind when you get your results. Think about your guests and adjust accordingly if you know what each of them prefer.
These are the average ratios we are using for each combination of beverages:
Let us know in the comments if this is helpful and if you have any other suggestions. We’d love to hear from you!