Since we were not hiring someone to watch the drinks, we didn't want to make them too complicated. We decided to do bottled drinks for non-booze drinkers, and beer, wine, and one special drink for those who wanted to get a bit crazier.We actually had plans to use wine we'd made ourselves for the wedding. They even had cute, custom labels just for us, but it wasn't quite done in time. We put a few bottles out, but they are pretty horrid and headache inducing. So instead we made a last minute run to Trader Joe's where we picked up four cases of red wine and one case of white. We didn't do the Two Buck stuff, although I don't think it's a bad option if your guests don't really care about wine. Ours were all around $5-7/bottle, which seems to buy you decent wine if you are on a budget.
We had a few people bring their own, fancier bottles of wine to share at their tables. Our table had a few bottles of expensive wine that I'd saved for the wedding, though we also ended up drinking some of the cheap TJ's stuff (it wasn't bad).
The rest of the wine was set up on our drinks table, with all the cups and a few bottle openers. The kegs were in buckets next to the table (we had two pony kegs of local microbrews), and the non-alcoholic drinks were in a steel bucket on the ground next to the table as well.
For our extra drink we made vodka spiked sangria. All of our friends are big sangria drinkers so we knew it would go over well. Plus it's incredible easy to make. We threw several of the big juice bottles from Trader Joe's into a punch bowl with boxed wine, several glugs of vodka, and some frozen fruit. There was no particular science to it. One of my brideswomen made it pre-ceremony by tasting it as she went along until it seemed right. I did do some research before buying the boxed wine to find the good stuff.
For non-alocholic drinks we accompanied my mom and her CostCo card to CostCo to buy bulk Mexican Cokes, sparkling water, and Izze sparkling juices.
We also did regular and decaf coffee with dinner which we made in two regular drip coffee makers (my parent's and a borrowed one) and then put in the pretty press pots seen in the far corner of the picture below.
You can see in this picture that we had a box under the table for people to put empties in for later recycling. For the most part people were good about keeping the table clean, putting empty bottles down below, and generally keeping things nice. Any other questions about drinks? Let me know!