Planning the Bar for Your Company Holiday Party

The December calendar fills up before the decorations come out. By the time someone remembers the bar, the good dates are gone and the planning has to happen fast.

A company holiday party is not a wedding. The room is mixed, the timing is tighter, and half the guests know each other only well enough to be slightly careful. The bar can either loosen that up or become the reason everyone stands in line looking at their phones.

Here is how we think about it.

Keep the menu short

Two signature cocktails and a zero-proof option will serve a holiday party better than a full open bar.

A short menu pours faster, which matters more than range when a hundred people arrive inside the same fifteen minutes. It also gives people something to talk about. A drink with a name is a conversation; a vodka soda is a transaction.

If you want more breadth, beer and wine alongside two cocktails covers nearly everyone without slowing the line.

Plan for the people who are not drinking

At a company party this matters more than anywhere else.

Some of your team are driving. Some are pregnant and have not told anyone yet. Some are sober, and a work event is exactly where that becomes awkward. A good mocktail, in a real glass, with the same garnish as everything else, removes all of that quietly.

We build ours on the same fresh-pressed citrus and housemade syrups as the cocktails. Nobody can tell from across the room who is drinking what, which is the entire point.

Where the bar goes in the room

Put the bar where you want people to gather, because that is what will happen.

Against a far wall, it pulls the room apart and leaves a queue down one side. Nearer the centre, or off to one side of the main space with room on both sides, people collect around it and the party has a middle.

If your office or venue is tight, a compact four-foot bar fits where a longer one will not. If you have the room and the guest count, two five-foot bars can be combined into one long service line, or split into two stations so the line never forms in the first place.

Indoors, outdoors under cover, a warehouse, a showroom, a tent: the setup changes, the service does not.

What you buy and what we bring

We are a dry hire bar, which means you buy the alcohol and we bring everything else. For a company party that usually works out well, because whatever is left over belongs to the company, not to us.

Alcohol planning is included. Once the menu is set, we help build the shopping list with quantities, so nobody is standing in a liquor store in December guessing how much wine a hundred people drink.

Bartenders, bar tools, ice, garnishes and a printed bar menu come with every package. Every rental includes General and Liquor Liability Insurance, and bookings start with three hours of service.

A timeline that works

Book the date first; December fills earliest.

Settle the menu two to three weeks out, so the shopping list has time to be bought rather than scrambled for.

Tell us the guest count and the arrival pattern. A hundred people arriving at once needs a different plan from a hundred arriving across an hour, and that single detail shapes how we staff the bar.

The part people remember

Nobody goes back to work in January talking about the canapés. They talk about the thing that felt considered: a drink with their company's name on the menu card, a bartender who remembered what they ordered, the mocktail that was so good two drinkers switched to it.

That is what a bar can do for a company party, and it is mostly a matter of deciding early and keeping it simple.

If you are planning a holiday party in Colorado this year, send us the date through the inquiry form and we will start with the menu.