Planner
Work out the ice before you work out the drinks
Running out of ice ends a drinks table faster than running out of any single ingredient, and it is the one quantity almost nobody estimates correctly. Set the four inputs below and the planner works out ice, glassware, syrup and citrus, then tells you what can be done the night before.
The planner
How long
Where and how warm
How it is served
Ice budget
28lb of ice
That is about 32 tray fills at roughly 14 oz a tray, and it already counts what melts in the tub.
- Drinks poured
- 47
- Cups
- 60
- Straws
- 50
- Coasters
- 12
- Syrup
- 4 3/8cups
- Citrus juice
- 5 7/8cups
Do this the night before
- Freeze 32 tray fills starting the night before — a home freezer refills a tray in about four hours, not one.
- Cook 4 3/8 cups of syrup and cool it fully; warm syrup thins the drink it lands in.
- Juice 5 7/8 cups of citrus no more than four hours ahead, then keep it covered and cold.
- Mix pitchers to strength but hold the ice out until the first guest arrives.
Build this station
The Summer Iced-Drink StationBatch these three
- Real Lemonade — holds its acidity in a pitcher
- Iced Hibiscus Tea — brews cold overnight
- Cold Brew Concentrate — dilute to order
Where these numbers come from
How much ice actually melts
A 16 oz iced drink holds roughly 6 oz of ice by weight once it is built, which is about five or six standard cubes. That figure alone is not the budget, though, because ice sitting in a tub is melting the entire time the tub is open. On a warm day the planner adds about a third again on top of the per-drink figure, and on a hot day about three quarters, plus a fixed reserve per guest for the ice that is doing nothing but chilling bottles and pitchers.
The freezer is the real constraint. A standard tray holds around 14 oz of ice and takes roughly four hours to freeze solid in a home freezer, so a plan that needs twenty tray fills is a two-day plan, not a morning-of plan. If the number the planner gives you looks impossible for your freezer, that is the useful part of the answer: buy bagged ice for the volume and freeze your own only for the cubes people will actually see in a glass.
Why you need more cups than guests
People do not track their own glass. A cup gets set down on a windowsill, a second one gets poured, and by the third hour the count is running about fifteen percent ahead of drinks served. The planner builds that in rather than assuming everyone behaves. Straws run slightly under the cup count, since warm drinks and anything in a stemmed glass will not use one.
Coasters are the exception — they scale with seating surfaces, not with drinks, so the number is tied to guest count and caps out. Twenty-four is more than any normal room has places to set a glass down.
Syrup and citrus
Three quarters of an ounce of syrup per drink is the working average across the recipes on this site: lemonade and sodas sit above it, coffee drinks below. Citrus runs at about an ounce of juice per drink, and unlike syrup it does not keep. Juice squeezed more than about four hours ahead starts tasting dull and slightly bitter, which is why the prep list puts syrup on the night-before list and citrus on the same-day list.
If you would rather read the ratios directly, they are all in the syrup library, and the reasoning behind scaling a recipe without wrecking it is in batching without ruining the drink.
What the planner does not know
It does not know your guests. A late-afternoon gathering of people who drive home runs lighter than an evening one; a room full of people who all want the same iced coffee runs heavier on milk than the averages suggest. Treat the output as a floor you should not go below rather than an exact order, and round up on ice specifically, because it is the only item on the list that cannot be improvised at the last minute.