Logistics · September 23, 2026
Somewhere between the seating chart and the shuttle schedule, a line shows up on your to-do list that nobody warned you about: buy the alcohol. If you're hosting a BYOB mountain wedding, buying alcohol for a wedding in Summit County is its own small logistics project — a purchase, a pickup window, a 70-mile haul or a local staging plan, and a venue that has opinions about when it can arrive. Done in the wrong order, it eats a full day of your wedding week in a parking lot and on the phone.
Here's the right order.
Colorado sells beer, wine and spirits in different places — confirm before you drive
Spirits come from licensed liquor stores. Beer and wine are less predictable: what a store can sell depends on the license it holds, and two shops on the same street may carry different things. A grocery store that had beer last summer may or may not have the wine list you're picturing.
The worst version of this errand is driving forty minutes to a store that can't sell you the tequila. Before you plan a route, call each specific store and ask what they carry. Not the chain — the store, at that address, from a person.
Denver down the hill, or Frisco, Dillon and Silverthorne up here
Buying down the hill has real appeal: bigger shelves, more case pricing, more of everything. It also means a round trip over the Eisenhower Tunnel with a car full of glass, and the drive is the part that goes wrong. I-70 does not care about your timeline, and a Sunday afternoon backup can turn a two-hour errand into six.
The local option is quieter and often better. Stores in Frisco, Silverthorne and Dillon can frequently special-order case quantities and stage the whole order for one pickup — you walk in, someone hands you a cart that's already built, and you're back at the cabin in under an hour. You may pay a little more per bottle. You'll pay far less in wedding week.
If you're driving up from Denver anyway with an empty car, split it: buy the hard-to-find bottles down the hill and special-order the volume — beer, house wine, sparkling for the toast — locally.
Ask every store the same three questions
Whether you're calling a shop in Silverthorne or one off Colorado Boulevard, ask these three and write down the answers:
- Can you special-order in case quantities? Some stores will bring in anything by the case. Some will bring in almost nothing. This decides whether you have one pickup or five.
- What's your lead time on a special order? Ask for a date, not a range. "About a week" and "it'll be here Thursday the 12th" are different promises, and only one is a plan.
- What's your policy on returning sealed, unopened bottles? Some stores take back unopened stock, some only what they special-ordered, some nothing at all. This answer decides how comfortable you are over-buying — and buying a little long is smart when you're an hour from the nearest replacement.
Get each answer confirmed directly by the store that will fill your order. Don't assume a policy carries across locations, and don't go on what a friend's caterer said last year.
Time the pickup so it isn't on your wedding morning
Pick up two to three days out. Not the morning of.
Wedding morning has no slack in it. A store that opens late, a special order that didn't land, a case that came in short — any of those at 9 a.m. Saturday is an emergency. The same problem on Wednesday is an afternoon of mild annoyance, which is what it deserves to be.
Two or three days also means you need somewhere to put it, and this is where "we'll just stack it in the condo" meets reality. Measure in cases, not in "a lot." A case of wine is twelve bottles and roughly forty pounds; a case of beer is twenty-four cans. A hundred-guest wedding can easily run ten to fifteen cases across beer, wine and spirits, plus mixers if you're buying your own. That's a stack about the size of a loveseat, and it needs to sit somewhere cool, dark and out of the walkway — a garage bay, a mudroom, a closet floor. Not the back deck. Not the sunny side of the living room.
Before you commit to a pickup date, go physically look at the space where it will sit.
Getting it up I-70 without breaking anything
Shoulder-season weather is the real variable. A clear morning in Denver tells you nothing about the Tunnel approach or Loveland Pass in May or October. Check conditions the morning of the drive and assume you may leave later than planned.
Heat and sun are harder on wine up here than you'd guess. A trunk parked in direct sun at altitude gets hot fast, and heat flattens wine and pushes corks. Sparkling is the most sensitive of all. If the drive includes a long stop, move the wine into the air-conditioned cabin, and don't leave cases sitting in a parked car for hours.
Secure the glass. The descent into Silverthorne is a sustained downhill with real curves, and unsecured cases slide. Stack flat, keep the load low, fill the gaps with blankets or bags so nothing has room to shift, and keep breakables off the roof rack.
The handoff: what goes to the venue, and when
Call your venue early and get two specifics in writing: when alcohol is allowed on site, and where it can be stored until the event starts. Some venues have a narrow delivery window, some can't hold anything overnight, some want it all gone the same night. These answers are venue by venue, so ask yours rather than assuming.
Then split the order on purpose. What goes to the venue is what gets served: the beer, the wine, the spirits on the menu, the sparkling for the toast. What stays back is the overflow — the extra case, the backup bottles — held at the cabin so one person can make a short run if the night runs long.
On our end, the host supplies the alcohol; we provide the bartenders, bar setup, mixers, ice, and glassware. Our bartenders are TIPS/ServSafe alcohol-service certified. Send us your final counts a few days ahead and we'll build the bar around what you actually bought, not what the plan said back in March.
The pickup checklist
Keep this on your phone, not in a spreadsheet you have to scroll:
- Store name, address, phone, and the name of the person who took the order
- Pickup date and time window, confirmed the day before
- Counts by case, not by bottle — beer ___ cases, wine ___ cases, spirits ___ bottles, sparkling ___ bottles
- Special-order items listed separately, so you can verify they came in
- The return policy on sealed bottles, in one line
- Where each thing goes at home: venue pile vs. hold-back pile
- Blankets or bags already in the car before you leave
Check the counts against that list in the parking lot, before you drive away. Ten minutes there saves the drive back.
The alcohol run is the least romantic part of a mountain wedding and one of the easiest to get wrong. Call the stores, ask the three questions, pick up midweek, pack the car properly, split the order at the door — and it's one afternoon instead of one lost day.
If you'd like a bar team waiting on the other end of that haul, tell us about your date and venue through the quote form at /#contact.
← All posts