First off, I want to say hi to all you PNW'ers. I'm from WA (lived on both east and west sides over about 19 years of my life), but am now living in CA.

I'm getting married in Seattle at the end of May of this year. We're trying to decide if we want to buy alcohol (liquor and wine) in CA and drive up to WA for the wedding, or if we want to buy it up there. So we're planning to be in the area about a month before the wedding, which would give us time to drive down to OR to buy alcohol.

So my question is how much does hard alcohol cost in Oregon? Just for a comparison, we can get a half gallon of Jim Beam for about $20 down here in CA (when we were up in WA, it was about $45 for the same bottle...). So we're just trying to figure out if it's worth it to drive up from CA, or if it would be worth it to take a trip to OR to buy alcohol before the wedding....or if we should just say "screw it" and buy in WA...

Any insight would be much appreciated! Thanks!

 

Congrats!! Where you getting married?? Wouldnt it be sick if a bunch of G's mobbed up to the ceremony!! Liquor is expensive in WA fosho' whatever you do, don't buy it from here

 

Ha, no joke....when I moved down to CA, I was like a kid in a candy store....alcohol was so cheap and you could buy it anywhere (like a gas station or a drug store!).

We're getting married at Kubota Gardens (so pretty!) and Joker's wife's sister is doing my make up

 

Nice, we were going to get married there but there's no liquor allowed, and we wanted everything done in one place, so we decided on snoqualamie falls. Make sure to post up the date, we'll setup a meet around that time

 

Snoqualmie Falls is beautiful! But we were trying to get out for as cheap as possible (living in socal sucks all the money right away from you!), so we went with Kubota and Chinese Room for the reception. That, and by the time we set the date toward the end of October, a lot of places were already booked for May 31.

But back to the booze talk....where are the Oregonians?

 

haha thanks for mentioning that
by the way her B-day is just a day before ur wedding so be nice to her

 

If I were you I'd buy it down there and bring it up to your wedding.

Oregon's Liquor price is controlled by the state (OLCC) so the price sucks. We may not have Sales Tax here but the state jacks up the prices of liquor.

Plus I've been to Cali and the prices are definitely cheaper.

Oh... and GL on the wedding... LOL

 

How jacked up are we talking? Like double the price of what we can buy down here? I'm just curious if it's worth the extra time (and mileage on the car) it would take to drive. Although I've thrown around the idea of driving back down through wine country for the honeymoon....so maybe buying down here and doing it that way is the way to go....

 

YEah, I used to live in CA several years ago... For the price of a big bottle of Absolut, will only get you a small bottle in Oregon. So yeah, double sounds about right... A $20 bottle of Citroen will cost $39 in Oregon. (At least it was the last time I bought in OR... WA prices are all over the map. I've gotten Greygoose and Don Julio for the same exact price in WA as CA, but paid about $12 more for Skyy.

For the most part, liquor is definately cheaper in CA... In fact, whenever I have a business trip in Cali, my coworker and I load up our carry on bags with liquor

I live across the river in WA... Liquor is still more expensive in WA than CA, but it's cheaper than OR.

If you really want to save on alcohol costs, and you'll be in SEattle... Drive up to the canadian border, and buy the alcohol from the duty-free store Canadian border is like 90 minutes from seattle. At least, I've made it there in 90 minutes before. Just don't forget your passport if you do that.

 

Hmmm, I had not thought of going north....that's a pretty good idea! Do you know how much alcohol you can bring across the border in one trip? I'm sure there's a limit on how much can be brought across....I just wonder if that limit is more/less than the amount we'll need for a wedding.

We're getting a couple kegs of Mac & Jacks so I don't really give a crap about the hard alcohol, but the fiance wants it!

 

If you stay in canada at least 48 hours, then technically you can bring back 1 litre of spirits per person duty free. However, if you declare more than this limit, the duty is only $2 per 1 litre bottle, so it's still pretty cheap.

I got this information from the The Canadian Duty Free Store

Last time I drove into the US from Canada on I-5, the US customs officer asked what I was bringing. I said I had bought a bunch of alcohol. He asked what kind, but never asked how many