Planning a Drink Savvy Party

A wee while ago I was approached by Asia Pacific Breweries Ltd and asked if I would like to host a “responsible drinking” or “drink savvy” party, and blog about it.

This sounded a fun challenge, even without the chance to win a trip for two to Aussie thrown in. Any excuse for a party, as they say.

Now a drink savvy party is a bit more of a challenge than a normal party. Anyone can arrange a normal party – just just text a dozen mates and say BYO 🙂

So a planning committee of myself, Chris and Amie was convened. We decided to hold it at Chris and Amie’s as they have a sheltered back yard, ideal for parties.

The first decision was the date. Initially I was thinking New Years Eve, but figured that it is more fun on NYE to just head into town for the big parties. So we decided to have the party on New Years Day itself – a sort of recovery from the night before party.

Figured after NYE, people wouldn’t want to be up too late, so we have gone for a start time of 4 pm – enjoy some afternoon sun.

Then came the big challenge. As readers will know I’m not greatly into nanny state restrictions around alcohol sales etc, and am a free market sort of person.

So that got me thinking – free markets work best with perfect information. So the drinks for the party would be clearly arranged to allow party goers to make the best decisions for themselves, rather than nanny state.

We decided to put together three mixtures of punch:

1. A non-alcoholic punch, knowns as the drivers’ punch. Very yummy but alcohol free, so drivers of all ages are safe to drive
2. A punch with a bit of a kick, known as the passengers’ punch. This would be ideal for those who just have to get into and out of a car to get home. Allows them to have fun, without worry.
3. The third punch would be an in-between punch – alcoholic, but not too strong. I wanted to call this the cyclists’ punch :-), but in the end we settled for calling it the pedestrians’ punch. If you are walking home, you want to be happy, but not too happy.

Following this theme, we also went for three types of beer:

1. 1% low alcohol beer
2. Normal 4% beer
3. A few selected bottles of Bavarian beer – details in a later post

So I got dispatched to the supermarket for the party purchases. The list:

• 2 kg of oranges
• 2 kg of lemons
• 1 kg of limes
• 1 bag of mint
• 1 cucumber
• 2-3 large bottles of Chi
• 2 bottles of Schweppes Classic Dry Lemonade
• 1 vodka
• 1 Jack Daniels
• 1 large bottle of Ocean Spray cranberry juice
• 1 large bottle of pineapple juice
• 300-400 grams of passion fruit pulp
• Assorted Beer
• Diet Coke
• Apple Juice
• Lots and lots of cheerios
• Three big bag of chicken drumsticks

Took me a while to find the mint (I mean seriously!) and got the purchases back to the venue:

Hopefully the weather will be as good tomorrow as it was today.  We then discovered a threat to the party:

Chicken drumsticks and CoCo the dog make a bad combination. We managed to rescue the chicken in time, and gave her some cheerios instead.

Tomorrow will be the making of the three punches, and then the party itself.