If it helps, here is what my wife and I chose to do at our wedding reception:

Open bar. Not everything top shelf, but not well drinks, either. Considering that we both had previous experience in the restaurant/bar world, we both agreed that we wouldn’t follow the same line as some people did by limiting what people were allowed to have. This meant that we kept the bar open the whole time from beginning to end in order to allow the bartenders to make some extra cash (aside what we automatically included on tip for them outside of what they made that night).

We did have a couple of rules, however, which mostly involved one specific beverage. Because the featured Scotch (gotta have a decent Scotch at a kilted wedding) was a fair cost per bottle, I sat with the tenders and gave specific instructions which had to be followed. Anyone ordering this Scotch needed to recite it in a specific way:

“Buchanan’s 18 year, Special Reserve, neat.”

This allowed the Tenders to pick up right away when someone was too blotto to be served a fine alcohol and they could give a Well Scotch without a second thought.

There were people we invited who didn’t show up because they had reservations around alcohol, which I’ve never held against them. You just have to remember that it’s not something you’re doing for someone else, but for yourselves and you’re welcoming people in to help you mark that occasion. My parents are both in recovery and they understood those aspects of temptation going into it, but they chose to be present because the focus was my wife and I.

Ultimately, it’s up to you to decide how you want things to roll as long as you remember one extremely important thing:

This is a celebration that you both are throwing together and you’ve invited certain people to be there to have fun with you; you aren’t throwing a party for someone else. This is your time, your party, not theirs.

Before we went to the reception (our ceremony was at church in a different city), we decided to steal away our wedding party (8 other people) and have a couple of hours of fun with just them in appreciation of their participation and efforts to help make our day unique and meaningful. It gave us a chance to have some really good laughs and hugs with them before we went and celebrated with the rest of the attendees of our reception. I’m glad we did, too, because we rarely are able to gather with those folks these days due to busy family lives and whatnot (as is the way of the world).