The Drinks Reception: How to Fill the Hour After the Ceremony

Couples spend months on the ceremony, which lasts about half an hour, and months on the meal, which lasts about two. In between sits a stretch that often runs just as long as the meal and gets almost no thought at all. The drinks reception. The bit where everyone stands on a lawn holding a glass while you are somewhere behind a hedge having your photograph taken.

It is the part of the day guests spend the most unstructured time in, and the part most likely to sag. It is also, quietly, where a good chunk of the per-head spend goes. Bridebook's 2026 UK Wedding Report puts the average cost per guest at £272, up 4% on the year, and a fair slice of that is canapés, welcome drinks and the extra hour of staffing that this window needs.

Here is how to plan it properly.

First, find out how long it actually is

Ask your venue and your photographer separately, then compare answers.

The venue will tell you how long the turnaround takes if the ceremony and the meal are in the same room. Clearing chairs, laying tables and resetting a room takes real time, usually an hour and often more, and no amount of goodwill compresses it. If you are marrying somewhere else entirely, ask instead about arrival gaps, because guests who drive themselves will trickle in over twenty minutes.

Your photographer will tell you how long the group shots take. The honest answer is roughly three to five minutes per grouping once you include the fetching, and the fetching is the slow part. Twelve groupings is an hour, comfortably.

Between the two you will usually land on 90 minutes to two hours. Very few couples plan for two hours. Plenty end up with it.

Feed them properly, and early

Most guests will have eaten breakfast and nothing since. If your ceremony is at one o'clock and the meal is served at four, that is a long stretch on an empty stomach with a glass of fizz in hand, and it shows in the speeches.

The usual UK guidance holds up well: three to four canapés a head for a 45 to 60 minute reception, five to six if it is running to an hour and a half or two, and another two or three per person for every extra hour beyond the first. Budget roughly £8 to £12 a head for canapés at 2026 prices, mid range.

Two practical notes. Get the canapés circulating within ten minutes of guests arriving, not thirty, because the first half hour is when people are most stranded. And make sure the vegetarian and allergy options come round as often as the others rather than appearing once, apologetically, on a small tray.

Drinks, without over-buying

One drink per guest per hour is the working rule, with a little headroom. For a reception hour that means one glass of something on arrival and a top-up, not an open bar running at full tilt.

Have a soft option that somebody would actually choose. A jug of tap water on a table is not a drinks offer. An elderflower cooler, a decent alcohol-free sparkling, a proper cordial with fruit in it, any of these cost very little and mean the drivers, the pregnant guests and the people who simply are not drinking today get handed something at the same time as everybody else.

In late July, add shade and water to the list before you add anything else. A lawn with no shade at two in the afternoon is not a drinks reception, it is an endurance event. Ask where the shade actually falls at that hour, and put water somewhere obvious and refilled.

If you are supplying your own alcohol

Two separate things to check, and people mix them up.

Corkage is your venue's charge for serving drink you brought yourself. It is a commercial term in your contract, so get the per bottle figure in writing early, including whether it differs for wine and sparkling.

Licensing is the law. If alcohol is being sold anywhere that is not already licensed, a marquee in a field being the classic case, somebody needs a Temporary Event Notice from the council. It costs £21, you must apply at least ten clear working days before the event, and an individual can hold up to five a year, or fifty if they hold a personal licence. If drink is genuinely free to guests and nobody is selling anything, you are usually outside that, but the safe move is a phone call to the licensing team at the council rather than a guess in March.

Give people something to do, but do not programme it

The temptation is to fill the whole window with activity. Resist most of it. Guests actually want to find their friends, get a drink, find the loo and sit down for a minute.

What earns its place:

• Somewhere to sit. Hay bales, garden furniture, a handful of chairs at the edges. Older guests and anyone in new shoes will thank you.
• One thing to look at or do. Lawn games, a guest book that is not a blank book, a table of photographs. One is plenty.
• Sound. An acoustic musician or a decent playlist through speakers that actually reach the far end of the lawn. Silence makes a garden feel like a waiting room.
• A clear sign or a person. Somebody who can say where the loos are and when the meal is. Ushers, or your venue's front of house.

What tends not to: a full second act of entertainment while people are trying to talk to each other.

Remember that you will barely be there

This is the one couples underestimate. If you have group shots and couple portraits, you may get twenty minutes of your own drinks reception, spread thin.

Two ways to handle it. Front load the group shots immediately after the ceremony so they are done while everyone is still gathered, then rejoin. Or do a receiving line, which sounds old fashioned and is genuinely efficient: it gets you a few words with every guest, in one pass, at a rate of about ten to fifteen guests every five minutes.

If you would rather skip both, say so early. The alternative to a receiving line is not "we will catch everyone during the day". It is deciding in advance which twenty conversations matter and building them into the timing.

Write it down and share it

The whole thing works when everyone in the wedding party knows the shape of it. What time the ceremony ends, when canapés go out, when the group shots happen and who is in them, when the room opens, when people sit.

That is exactly the kind of thing that gets agreed in a phone call in April and forgotten by July. Keep the running order somewhere everybody can see the current version rather than in one person's inbox, and give your photographer, your caterer and your best man the same link.

An hour and a half is a long time to stand about with nothing arranged. It is also, planned properly, one of the nicest parts of the day: warm afternoon, everyone you love in one garden, nothing to do next but eat.

Sources: Bridebook UK Wedding Report 2026; GOV.UK, Temporary Events Notice.