How the list is made

Every bar in Victoria needs a liquor licence, and the licence register is public. Knock Twice reads it for signs that a venue is easy to walk past.

Leads, not findings

The register records where a venue may trade, under what kind of licence and how many people it may hold. It does not record doors, signs or stairwells. So the list cannot say a bar is hidden. It can only say where one might be.

Some venues here are ordinary bars up a flight of stairs. Some well-known hidden bars are missing, because their licence looks like any shopfront. The only way to know is to go and look. When you have, vote on what you found.

Which venues are considered

Venues holding a general, on-premises or late night licence in seven inner councils: Melbourne, Yarra, Port Phillip, Stonnington, Merri-bek, Darebin and Maribyrnong. Restaurant and cafe licences are left out, so a bar trading under one will not appear.

The reasons and what they are worth

Each reason adds or removes points. A venue is listed when its points come to 3 or more, and the list is ranked by score, highest first. Equal scores go to the smaller licensed room, then alphabetically. Every venue shows its own reasons and points, so you can see how its rank was reached.

The weights were set by hand and have not been tuned against a checked sample, so read the score as a rough order, not a measurement.

  • Basement (+3): The licensed premises are below street level.
  • Rear of building (+3): The licensed address is the rear of a building.
  • Upstairs (+2): The licensed premises are on an upper floor, with no ground floor in the licence.
  • Laneway address (+1): The street address is a lane, place, alley or arcade.
  • Very small room (+2): Licensed for 60 patrons or fewer.
  • Small room (+1): Licensed for 61 to 120 patrons.
  • Not on OpenStreetMap (+1): No bar, pub, restaurant or cafe with a similar name is mapped within 100 m.
  • No Google listing found (+2): A Google Places search for the trading name at this address found no matching listing.
  • Few Google reviews (+1): The matching Google listing has fewer than 50 reviews.
  • Google lists it as another kind of venue (-3): The matching Google listing is not categorised as a bar, pub or nightclub.
  • Inside a complex (-3): The address is a tenancy in a shopping centre, casino, stadium or similar.
  • Name suggests another kind of venue (-3): The trading name reads as a restaurant, karaoke room, pool hall, club or similar.

Votes

Anyone who has been to a venue can vote on whether it is a secret bar. Each venue shows the count both ways. Votes do not change the score or the rank: the rank is what the records suggest, and the votes are what people found. Votes are anonymous and one per browser per venue, so a count is a show of hands and not proof.

Sources

  • Victorian liquor licences by location, published monthly by Liquor Control Victoria on data.vic.gov.au under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Trading names and addresses are shown as the register gives them, with capital letters tidied.
  • OpenStreetMap, © OpenStreetMap contributors, under the Open Database Licence. Used to check whether a venue with a similar name is mapped nearby.
  • Google Places, for some venues: whether a listing exists at the address, whether Google calls it a bar, and whether it has few reviews. These checks are dropped after 30 days and redone.
  • The map view draws on CARTO basemap tiles, which are built from OpenStreetMap data. It loads only when you open the map.

Who makes it

Knock Twice is made by Lotlsoft, a sole-trader software shop in Melbourne. If a venue here is yours and the entry is wrong, the support page says how to reach us.