How we choose.
Every guide should say what it counts and what it leaves out. Here is ours, in full.
- Verified happy hours
- 550
- Openings tracked
- 271
- Last sweep
- Oct 20, 2026
The inclusion rule
A happy hour is published when we can point at the days, the window, and a source that says so, at a venue that is still open. Anything we cannot verify in the last 60 days is removed, not left to rot.
- Where the data comes from
- Venue websites, official Google listings, county health permit filings, state liquor licence records and hyperlocal news. Every row carries the date it was last verified. Where a newsroom reported an opening first, the radar row names them and links back, ARLnow, FFXnow and ALXnow included. We aggregate a signal, we do not take the byline.
- How often it is checked
- The openings radar runs daily. The full happy hour sweep runs weekly. Rows unverified for 60 days expire off the site automatically.
- Is it still open
- A happy hour is only worth printing if the bar still pours it. Every venue's own website is checked each week, every venue's Google listing is read for its open or closed status once we have confirmed the listing is the same business at the same address, and every venue is researched against its public listings and local news. A venue comes off when a listing for its exact address says it has closed, when a newsroom reports the closure, or when two independent signals agree. One dead link is never enough on its own, because plenty of good bars let a domain lapse, and a bar wrongly marked closed is as much an error as a closed one left up. A rebrand at the same address is updated, not removed.
- Only places you can walk into
- Every venue here serves the public. Private clubs, veterans' and fraternal lodges, country clubs, retirement communities, schools and offices can hold a liquor licence and run a happy hour for their members or residents, and none of them is listed, because a reader who turns up would be turned away.
- Chains and groups
- Chains and any brand running more than one location in the region stay in the ledger, because the ledger is a directory and should be complete. They are never featured. A feature slot is for independents.
- What earns a feature
- An exact price, an exact window, and a real photograph. No price, no feature. We do not accept payment for placement and we never have.
- Photography
- Photographs come from the venue itself or from public listings and local news coverage of it. We use no stock imagery.
- Corrections
- Happy hours change without notice. If a row is wrong, email [email protected] and it gets re-verified and re-stamped. Venues can write in too: if your happy hour is missing or the terms have changed, tell us and it goes in on the same standard as everyone else.
- What we do not claim
- We do not review food and we do not rank venues by quality. We have not eaten at all 550 of these. This is a verified record of what is offered and when, not a critic's list.
- What is still missing
- 301 of the 550 rows confirm a happy hour without publishing the prices, and 36 do not post a clean window. Usually the terms sit in a photographed menu or a PDF we cannot read. Those rows say so rather than guessing, and the gap is the backlog we work through each week.
- Using what we publish
- Quote a row, cite a number, or link to any page here. That is what it is for. The ledger itself is our own work, rebuilt and re-checked every week, and it is not licensed for bulk reuse or republication. If you want the data behind something you are building, ask.
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