Having a dinner party? You may want to start or end the get-together around your home bar, especially if you have a kegerator. This can make for a fun and informal night.

Dinner parties have always notoriously been a more formal way to get together with friends. They often include the invitation of a few select people or couples and a somewhat formal procession to the evening. Dinner parties typically start with a drink or two, so people can get to know one another if they don’t already or catch up with old friends if they do, followed by a sit-down meal in the dining room.

After the main meal has been served, the party can become a bit more relaxed, with guests adjourning to the living room, family room or game room. A few more drinks, or coffee and dessert, can end the evening – or the dinner party can transition into a whole night of more informal fun.

If you want to add a bit of fun and informality to your next dinner party, start or end the evening around your home bar and tap into the kegerator. Nothing sets the tone for a more casual and enjoyable night like a few draft beers shared around the bar. If you don’t have a home bar, complete with an under counter kegerator filled with beer, have no fear. A glamorous stainless steel mini kegerator set up on a counter or table serves the purpose well, too. Mini kegerators fit small 5 liter beer barrels, which should be enough beer to serve to a dinner party crowd, and they dispense the beer through a tap, just like a real bar.

One increasingly popular method of planning a dinner party these days is to plan a progressive dinner party. This works well if all the people at the party live fairly close by and works especially well if you are planning the party with neighbors. In a progressive dinner party, each phase of the dinner is hosted by a different person, in a different house.

So, you can start with appetizers in one person’s house, have drinks in another, the main meal in a third, and dessert at yet another home. If you have more people than that, or want to keep the party going longer, you can then head to another home for more drinks and socializing. Progressive dinner parties are a great way to spend a fun evening and equally spread around the work of entertaining a crowd.

When planning progressive dinners, everyone usually volunteers to host the portion of the dinner that they feel most comfortable with. That means that, if you’re lucky, the person with the best stocked bar or a full kegerator of beer, will be the one to host the pre-dinner or post-dinner drinks. [Use our beer calculator to see how much beer you will need for your dinner party] If you’re the type of crowd that likes to split your time a bit after the formal portion of the dinner is over so that the guys can hang out and shoot the breeze, maybe play some pool and throw back a few beers while the ladies open a couple of bottles of wine and catch up, then it makes sense that the guys head to the house with the kegerator while the women head to the house with the fully stocked wine refrigerator.

Having a kegerator or a mini kegerator is certainly not a necessity when planning a dinner party, but if you or one of your dinner party guests happens to own a kegerator, it can certainly add to the enjoyment of the evening.