9-12 months out: lock in your date and your bar service
Bar service is one of the first vendor decisions that should happen alongside your venue booking, not after it. Denver's peak wedding season runs May through October, and bartending teams — ours included — book out 3 to 6 months in advance for those dates. If you're getting married on a Saturday in June, July, or September, treat your bar service the way you'd treat your photographer: lock it in early.
At this stage, you don't need final numbers. You need a venue, a rough guest count range, and a sense of whether you want a hosted bar, a cash bar, or a mixed approach (common for Colorado weddings: beer and wine hosted, liquor cash). That's enough to get a preliminary proposal and hold your date.
4-6 months out: decide your bar style and start the cocktail conversation
This is when it's worth deciding whether you want a fully custom cocktail menu, a simplified beer-and-wine package, or something in between. If you want a signature cocktail named for the two of you (a genuinely popular request), this is the window to start talking through flavor profiles — what you both actually drink, not just what looks good on a menu card.
It's also the right time to talk through venue-specific logistics: does your venue have a liquor license of its own, or do you need your bar service to carry liquor liability insurance and provide documentation? Most Denver-metro venues require the latter, and it's a five-minute conversation to confirm coverage upfront rather than a scramble the week of.
6-8 weeks out: confirm your guest count and bar layout
Bartender staffing is driven by guest count and bar format, not a flat number. As a general guide, plan on one bartender per 75-100 guests for a single bar station — a 150-guest reception with one central bar usually runs smoother with two bartenders than one, especially during the cocktail hour rush right after the ceremony.
This is also when you should finalize whether you're running one bar or splitting service between a ceremony/cocktail-hour bar and a separate reception bar, since that changes both staffing and equipment needs.
2 weeks out: final headcount, final menu, final logistics
Final guest count, final cocktail selections, and any last add-ons (a champagne toast, a late-night snack-and-drink station) should be locked in about two weeks before the wedding. This is also when we confirm arrival time relative to your ceremony start, load-in access at your venue, and any building-specific quirks — freight elevators, loading dock hours, that kind of thing.
None of this needs to be stressful if it's spread across months instead of crammed into the final week. The couples who enjoy their own wedding bar the most are usually the ones who made these decisions early and then stopped thinking about it.
Planning an event of your own?
Tell us your date and guest count — we’ll put together a custom bar package and pricing, usually within one business day.
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