And fortunately for me, my wife happens to be one of them. Against her better judgement, she bravely said yes to a lifetime of gurgling fermentors, stovetop boilovers, and the occasional incident in which I attempt to rack six gallons of beer into a 5-gallon carboy.
So when the time came to plan our wedding, we could have chosen a bridal ale, but we agreed that I should brew all of the beer for the reception. Having never served 100+ guests before, I found the task was a bit of an undertaking. It wasn’t difficult, but it did require some forethought and patience. Here are a few things I learned.
Keep it simple.
The beer geek devil on my left shoulder would have had us serve eight different shades of ale from blonde to black. The practically minded angel to my right, however, warned that complexity would equal frustration. In the end, I decided on two styles with broad appeal—an American pale ale and an Irish red ale—that satisfied craft nerds and casual imbibers alike. These two styles also required minimal aging, which meant that I had time to brew replacements if anything went wrong.
Blending is your friend.
Our venue’s draft system was configured for commercial kegs, so I decided to package my beer in Sankey half barrels (15.5 gallons or 59 liters) to make things easy for the servers. But since I brew in 5-gallon batches, I had to combine three batches to fill one keg. This necessitated three brew days per keg, but blending meant that minor variations in individual batches were unnoticeable in the final melange. And blending also offered the flexibility to brew some of the batches from extract, which was wonderfully convenient as the date drew nearer and demands on my time increased.
Your guests will drink more than you think.
We thought that planning for every man, woman, and child to have four pints would yield a conservative estimate for how much beer to brew. After all, the kids wouldn’t drink (my wife made homemade sodas for them), and we knew that many guests would stick to wine and mixed drinks. But our party hit the homebrew so hard that we had to bring in emergency commercial craft beer (the horror!) after the kegs kicked. In the end, our estimates weren’t actually off by too much, but an extra sixth barrel of homebrew would have kept things flowing right to the end.
If you’re a homebrewer, or if you’ve found yourself engaged to one, then (1) congratulations, and (2) consider brewing your own beer for the occasion. Figuring out the logistics of serving a large number of people may be challenging, but the smiles on your guests’ faces will make it worthwhile. Just make sure your photographer captures those smiles because you may well not remember a thing.