Where the venues come from
Two sources, doing two different jobs. The base record comes from Foursquare's open dataset. It establishes that a place exists and where it stands. Everything after that is ours, read off the venue's own website and what the bar publishes publicly.
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What the Mudl score means
Every bar we judge is scored on a scale from 1.0 to 5.0. It is Mudl's opinion, assembled from stated criteria, and it weighs four things.
The four weights. The length of each block is its share of the assessment.
One scale, 1.0 to 5.0, for every bar in the country.
The number you see mixes members in
A bar shows a score once three distinct members have rated it. That score is one number: our assessment and members' ratings, blended. Members carry more of it as more of them weigh in, and our assessment always keeps a share, so the number reflects the people who drink there as well as the evidence we read. The rating count travels with the score, and your own stars remain yours in the app.
- 60%3 ratings
- 75%6 ratings
- 80%8 ratings
- 90%18 and up
Example · 8 ratings
× 20%
× 80%
8 ratings
The internal assessment still decides which bars we publish and how we order them. Below three ratings, the bar waits for contributions.
What goes into the assessment
Twenty-eight things go into a room’s assessment. The room can change twelve of them. None of them is money.
- 12 The room
- 6 The press
- 5 Mudl
- 3 Arithmetic
- 1 Foursquare
- 1 Members
The cocktail program
What is on the list, how it is built, how far it goes: original drinks, house-made ingredients, seasonal rotation, range.
Show the eight inputs Hide the inputs
- How many drinks the menu listsThe room
- What each drink’s description saysThe room
- What goes into each drinkThe room
- What each drink costsThe room
- Each drink’s style, where the menu gives oneThe room
- Whether the menu on file is the room’s ownThe room
- A cap when no drink list can be readMudl
- How the menu is divided. Context only; it never moves the assessmentThe room
Standing
Awards, named citations, and how many separate publications have written about the bar.
Show the eight inputs Hide the inputs
- Best-in-the-country lists that name the roomThe press
- National, regional and local guides that name itThe press
- How many separate publications have written about itThe press
- Industry awardsThe press
- How strong those citations are, read from the sourcesThe press
- Whether the press can be matched to it, by its website and InstagramThe room
- How established the city’s cocktail scene is (the same for every room)The press
- Mudl’s own description of the roomMudl
The room
The space itself and the visual evidence for it.
Show the three inputs Hide the inputs
- How many approved photos show the roomThe room
- What each photo shows, as Mudl recorded itMudl
- Which photo leads, and where each came fromThe room
Cocktail focus
How central drinks are to what the place is.
Show the four inputs Hide the inputs
- How central drinks are in Mudl’s descriptionMudl
- Its hours, late nights includedThe room
- Its website addressThe room
- How Foursquare files the roomFoursquare
How the number is kept
- The weights, a 3.5 cap when the program is thin, and the 1.0–4.9 rangeArithmetic
- Small moves wait: under 0.3, or without a stated reason, nothing changesArithmetic
- A number set by hand outranks the engineMudl
- Members’ stars lean the order once a room has ten reviewsMembers
- A fingerprint of all of the above: unchanged means not re-readArithmetic
Verified rooms
A room is verified when its owner has claimed the page and keeps it accurate: the latest menu, current hours and photos, and answers to guests. In Asheville, that is every room that claims.
Verified rooms carry a mark beside their name and can be shown on their own in Explore. Being verified is not one of the twenty-eight. A verified room is assessed exactly like any other, and it never decides which rooms we publish.
Verifying is something an owner does for their own page. No brand, sponsor or advertiser can pay for it, and no brand’s money reaches a room through it.
- Name
- Verified.
- Where
- Beside the room’s name, on the Explore card, the app’s venue page and this site’s venue page.
- Label
- The stamp alone beside a name on a card or the map; the stamp and the word Verified on a room’s page. Tapping it opens the same short explanation in the app and on this site.
- Never
- Changes a room’s score, or decides which rooms we publish.
- Ends
- When no owner keeps the page, or the plan or grant ends. Asheville’s founding grant never ends.
What keeps a bar off Mudl
A bar is not published when:
- it has no cocktail program: a brewery, a dive, a restaurant bar with a well and nothing more
- it is closed, or we cannot establish that it is still open
- we have not read it yet; an unread bar waits rather than appearing as an empty listing
- we cannot confirm which website is the venue’s own
- it fails the quality check, in which case it stays unlisted until something changes
Corrections
Tell us and we will fix it. A wrong fact does not need to come from the owner to get corrected, and a bar that wants off the site can say so.
More about who we are is on the about page.