Looking for Professional Bartending Services?
Professional bartending services such as Top Shelf Bartending distinguish ourselves by providing outstanding professionalism and worry-free private party or wedding reception bartending.
We understand that the last thing event planners and hosts want to worry about is a hired staff member failing to display adequate professionalism on someone’s wedding day or during a big event. This is why we keep a tight staff of RAMP Certified and SafeServ Certified bartenders, servers, and managers, and why we carry a pair of pricey liquor-specific insurance policies.
There will inevitably come a time when you or someone in your life is looking to secure professional bartending services for a wedding reception, graduation party, retirement party, or anniversary. Even if you are not a big drinker, bartending service at wedding receptions is as commonplace as cake and dancing, and you may need guidance in determining what to look for in alcohol service.
This article is being written to help hosts secure high-quality professional bartenders or services for their next event or wedding reception, and to highlight Five Key Questions that hosts should ask professional bartending services prior to booking. Read on to learn more.
1. Are the Professional Bartending Services Insured?
This is a point that Top Shelf has driven into the ground. Holding an annual alcohol-specific insurance policy such as Retail Liquor Liability Insurance is the key difference between legitimate professional bartending services and individuals moonlighting as bartenders on the weekends.
Venues and venue owners needing bartending service for wedding receptions or other special events should be doubly concerned with securing an insured professional service.
Here’s an important point from a recent CBS News Story on Wedding Bartending Insurance:
Having liquor liability insurance goes beyond protecting you against the risks related to your profession. This insurance policy is mandatory for businesses that serve or sell alcohol. Depending on the location of your bartending business, you will need this insurance policy to obtain your business license. Liquor liability insurance is very important, especially in states with dram shop laws. These states hold businesses and individuals accountable for the actions of intoxicated people.
Top Shelf Bartending has discussed Dram Shop Laws at length in a number of our other blog posts. Dram Shop Laws – aka Third-Party Liability Laws pursuant to alcohol charges – vary greatly from state-to-state.
It’s incumbent upon venue owners to know their state’s liquor laws, and to restrict their wedding reception staffing to fully insured professional bartending services if required by their state.
2. Does the Bartending Service Offer Packages?
One way that professional bartending services separate themselves from non-professionals is that full-time services typically offer an array of package options.
Top Shelf Bartending offers a handful of different package options. These include Mixer Packages – meaning the fruit juice, soda pop, and so forth – Deluxe Mixer Packages, Full-Service Packages including alcohol delivery, Ice Service, Coffee Service, and Signature Cocktails.
Hosts sometimes want to supply all of the mixers, soft drinks, ice, and alcohol themselves, and that’s completely fine. It’s actually a nice break for us when we can just show up and bartend. But more often than not – roughly 80-85% of the time – hosts have Top Shelf Bartending provide some sort of mixer package or delivery service.
The advantage of going with a package option from a professional bartending service such as Top Shelf is that we do events and wedding receptions every weekend – sometimes as many as 4-6 events on a given Saturday or Sunday.
As such, we are keenly aware of how much of a particular product we tend to use, and we can give hosts important guidance when it comes to quantities and selection for both alcohol and mixers.
Here is a sample Mixer Package for ~140 Guests that we recently wrote for the host of a wedding reception:
A standard Mixer Package for ~140 guests would include the following:
- All necessary bar tools
- Bar straws, stirs, and napkins
- Cups – ~600 (260 5 oz wine cups, 300 12 oz cocktail cups, 50 16 oz beer cups)
- Grenadine, simple syrup, and sweetened lime juice
- Lemons and limes
- 8 1L bottles each of Club Soda and Tonic Water
- 3 35-packs of Coca-Cola or Pepsi (105 cans)
- 2-3 35-packs each of Diet Coke and Sprite (70-105 cans each)
- 3 1L bottles of Ginger Ale
- 4 large bottles of orange juice
- 4-6 large bottles of cranberry juice
- 3-4 large bottles of pineapple juice
Upon request, Top Shelf can also provide the following. These items typically add to the cost of the Mixer Package:
- Bottled water (two bottles per guest)
- Coffee service
- Grapefruit juice, Apricot Nectar, or Custom Simple Syrups (blackberry, strawberry, etc)
- Margarita and/or Sours mix, Margarita Salt
- Mint and Ginger Beer for Moscow Mules
- Oranges, Angostura Bitters, and Cocktail Cherries for Old Fashioneds
Again, hosts can serve whatever they would like at a given wedding reception or private party. More often than not, Top Shelf specifically tailors a mixer package to the tastes of a host or a certain crowd.
But our packages – as well as our buying guides for alcohol – give hosts a great place to start in terms of what to buy and how much to purchase.
Most professional bartending services will offer similar package options. It’s a good practice for anyone hosting an event or reception to inquire about a company’s package options early in the process.
3. Are the Bartenders Full-Time Professionals?
This isn’t to suggest that everyone who bartends needs to work 40+ hours a week as a bartender. Plenty of people, including most of the Top Shelf Bartending staff, work elsewhere during the week.
But hosts will also want to make sure that they aren’t hiring someone whose bartending experience consists of pouring wine for their neighbors.
The difference between an amateur and professional in most fields – including bartending – is striking, and even people who don’t drink can quickly discern a pro from a passenger.
As explained above, the first step Top Shelf Bartending takes in reinforcing professionalism to require all of our bartenders and servers to obtain a RAMP or SafeServ Certification. This shows, at a minimum, that the staff member is committed and willing to take the safe service of alcohol seriously.
Most of our bartenders and servers go above and beyond in terms of professionalism, and many people who decide to bartend with Top Shelf walk in with some alcohol safety or manager certification – even if the person isn’t presently bartending elsewhere.
Additionally, professional bartenders take their work seriously and prepare accordingly. This is an aspect that both the trained and untrained eye can pick up rather quickly.
There’s sometimes a misconception from naive hosts that bartenders roll out of bed and show up at a wedding reception or anniversary party with little to no preparation. While that may be the case with certain hires, high-quality professional bartender services are going to put a substantial amount of preparation into any event.
Professional services and vendors like Top Shelf Bartending do a substantial amount of prep work prior to any event, and that goes double for a wedding reception.
As it concerns professional services such as Top Shelf Bartending, failing to bring a strong level of professionalism to every event can profoundly affect our bottom line.
After all, putting integrity aside – and most professional bartender services will have a fair amount of that – outstanding professional work is an integral part of our business model. If we do not do a great job at a given wedding reception or private party, we will not get future referrals – or in some cases, even be welcome back at a given venue.
People who don’t do bartending for a living will view things differently, and they may work a wedding reception with the attitude that they are there to attend a party or wedding reception and have a good time.
While bringing energy and positivity is certainly part of the package, a key difference between a professional bartender and a tourist is that the professional understands that he or she is not attending a given event. They are part of the hosting team or staff and conduct themselves accordingly.
4. Are Your Rates Competitive?
This is typically one of the first questions that hosts ask, even before getting into their guest count or menu: how much does it cost for a bartender near me, or what do professional bartenders cost?
Any professional bartending service must be price-competitive within a given market. And in any free market, the market itself will typically ferret out outliers over time.
Top Shelf Bartending does not try to be the cheapest nor the most expensive option in our respective markets (bartender near me Pittsburgh PA, and bartending service Wilmington, NC). We try to price ourselves fairly within the context of our competition and put ourselves in the position of hosts and venue owners when establishing pricing.
To this point, the market moved rapidly in 2022 as the cost of goods – cups, cranberry juice, gasoline, everything – continued to inflate. Our pricing on both bartending service/insurance and mixer package options was right in the middle of the market in January 2022.
But by the fall, Top Shelf was the least expensive option for both service and mixer packages within both the Pittsburgh, PA, and Wilmington, NC regions among the bigger professional services. Our pricing organically slid as the cost of everything in 2022 continued to climb.
Top Shelf Bartending’s ethic is not to be the cheapest option in the market – our view is that pricing this way attracts problematic clients – but our clients are sometimes shocked when they receive a quote from us after pricing out a few of our competitors. There were ten or more times in 2022 when Top Shelf levied a quote that was less than half of what our competitors offered.
The lesson here is to price your product – whatever that may be – within the confines of the market. A business does not want to charge double what its competitors do – unless that business is really, really good or really niche – and a business also does not want to offer service at half of what its competitors do.
Our suggestion is for hosts to collect two or three quotes before booking service with Top Shelf. As written above, hosts are often pleasantly surprised – or even wowed – at the value that we provide.
But in some cases, certain companies may be able to deliver better value, and our company is cognizant of that. My general advice on purchasing, whether we are talking about bartending service or a boat, is to price out a given market before jumping into anything – unless it’s love at first sight.
5. What Separates Your Professional Bartending Service from Others?
Other professional bartending services will chafe at this question – most services don’t like being interviewed for work opportunities – but I love it when clients ask me how Top Shelf is different from our competitors. And I encourage hosts to ask other services how they try to stand out from the pack.
Top Shelf Bartending primarily provides service for wedding receptions – “Bridal” would be the industry term – and I stick out like a sore thumb, both in terms of my appearance and how I interact with people.
Because I come from a very different professional background than most other people in Bridal, I quickly realized that I would never be the best politician. I certainly do not have the eye for aesthetics that most of my fellow vendors do.
And while I am an exceptional bartender, most wedding receptions limit the amount of bartending talent that I can display. I won’t, at most receptions, be able to apply a torch to drinks, and most wedding bars aren’t set up for extended Manhattan + Martini service. So, I had to find a different way to distinguish myself and my business.
I try to run Top Shelf Bartending the same way that I would run an electric company. It’s a cliche, but my vision for my brand in one word is “professional“.
If a client or host has an issue, I typically drop what I’m doing to return calls or reply to emails. I am continuously refining my brand and adding social media/web content. I relentlessly advertise and market my business. And I am thorough – probably to an annoying degree – with my details and my scheduling.
This is the same approach I would take if I was selling produce or Porsches. While it may come across as a bit dry compared to how other vendors operate – particularly other professional bartending services – my goal is to take as much stress off of a host’s plate as possible and to ensure that their event or wedding reception runs as smoothly as possible.
Other services are not going to be as detail-oriented as Top Shelf Bartending, and certain hosts will naturally mesh better with services that are a bit more lax or informal. But I want everyone leaving a Google Review for Top Shelf Bartending to think, “Wow, these people did everything they possibly could to make my wedding reception great.”
Because at the end of the day, vendors such as professional bartending services are small, relatively unimportant pieces of the pie. Vendors are not there to outshine a bride and groom on their wedding day or detract attention during a fundraiser or anniversary party.
We are here to provide high-quality service, take care of the guests, and manage pitfalls that hosts may not know to anticipate. If we can provide fun and a few laughs along the way, all the better, but our team at Top Shelf Bartending doesn’t lose sight of our role in the grand scheme of an event or reception.
My closing suggestion would be for hosts and potential hosts to ask other vendors or professional bartending services how they distinguish themselves before booking or signing a contract.
Any business must know its core identity and ethic within a given marketplace, and if a manager or owner can’t clearly define how their business is different than their competitors, it might be best for a host to continue their search.
Thank you for reading. As always, hosts and potential hosts are encouraged to contact Top Shelf Bartending via our home page for quotes or additional information.
