US Liquor License Monitor — New Bar & Restaurant Leads (CA, NY, TX, MO, OR, Chicago)

A liquor-license application is the earliest public footprint of a new bar or restaurant — typically 3–8 weeks before a health permit, a Google listing or a job post. This Actor reads the official state and city license records every time it runs, normalizes them into one schema, classifies each filing as on-premise (bar / restaurant / tavern) or off-premise (stores), deduplicates across days and sources, and — in monitor mode — emits only the filings it has not emitted before. Point a schedule at it and you get a clean "new since last run" feed.

What it does

Jurisdiction	Source (public record)	Signal	Update cadence
California	ABC "New Applications" daily report	pending applications (types 41/47/48 = restaurants & bars)	daily, Mon–Fri
New York	NY SLA "Current Pending Licenses" (data.ny.gov)	pending applications	daily
Texas	TABC License Information (data.texas.gov)	newly issued permits (MB, BG, BE, private clubs)	daily
Missouri	ATC "New Liquor Licenses" (data.mo.gov)	newly issued (Retail by Drink etc.)	weekly, rolling 3 weeks
Oregon	OLCC "Liquor Applications Received" (data.oregon.gov)	pending applications (Full/Limited On-Premises)	daily
Chicago, IL	BACP Business Licenses (data.cityofchicago.org)	issued Consumption-on-Premises / Tavern	daily
Colorado	DOR "Recently Approved Liquor Licenses" (data.colorado.gov)	approved licenses	monthly (~5-week lag)

Each record carries the business name, legal entity, premises address, city, county, ZIP, license type code + label, on_premise flag, status, filing/issue date, event type (new_application, issued, transfer) and a link to the source.

Who it's for

• POS / payments resellers (Toast, Square, Clover, SpotOn partners): reach the owner before the first terminal is bought.
• Food & beverage distributors: open the account while the menu is still being written.
• Restaurant insurance, payroll, linen, signage, furniture, pest-control vendors: one list, filtered to your counties.
• n8n / Make / Zapier users and AI agents: schedule monitor mode and route each new filing to a CRM, Slack channel or enrichment step. The Actor is exposed through Apify's MCP server, so an agent can call it as a tool ("find new restaurant liquor applications in Los Angeles County this week").

Input

Field	Type	Default	Notes
states	array	CA, NY, TX, MO, OR, IL	IL = Chicago. CO is monthly.
license_classes	on_premise / off_premise / all	on_premise	on-premise = bar/restaurant style consumption
mode	monitor / backfill	monitor	monitor keeps a SEEN map in the Actor's default key-value store
days_back	integer 1–60	7	look-back window; CA = one polite request per day
counties	array of ST:County	[]	e.g. CA:Los Angeles, TX:Harris; empty = all
geocode	boolean	false	fill lat/lon + county FIPS via the US Census geocoder (charged per enriched record)
max_records	integer	5000	cost guard

{ "states": ["CA", "NY", "TX"], "license_classes": "on_premise", "mode": "monitor", "days_back": 7 }

Output (dataset)

{
  "state": "CA", "jurisdiction": "CA ABC (new applications)", "application_id": "683224",
  "status": "PEND", "license_type_code": "47", "license_type_label": "On-Sale General - Eating Place",
  "on_premise": true, "business_name": "TEQUILA RANCH ARCADIA", "legal_entity": "TEQUILA RANCH ARCADIA INC",
  "address": "103 E SANTA CLARA ST", "city": "ARCADIA", "county": "Los Angeles", "zip": "91006",
  "lat": null, "lon": null, "filed_date": "2026-10-02",
  "source_url": "https://www.abc.ca.gov/licensing/licensing-reports/new-applications/?RPTTYPE=2&DATEOFFSET=0#report-2026-10-02",
  "first_seen_at": "2026-10-06T03:10:00+00:00", "event_type": "transfer", "is_new": true
}

Monitor runs also write RUN_SUMMARY (counts, requests, anti-bot events) to the key-value store. To reset the monitor, delete the SEEN record from the Actor's default key-value store (or run with a fresh task).

Pricing (pay per event)

Event	Price	When
actor-start	$0.005	once per run
new-filing-detected	$0.03	monitor mode: a filing never emitted before by this Actor
license-record	$0.008	backfill mode: every record in the window
enriched-record	$0.02	optional geocoding (lat/lon + county FIPS)

Typical: monitoring CA + NY + TX daily, on-premise only, ≈ 40–60 new filings/day → $1.2–1.8/day. A 30-day on-premise backfill of one large state ≈ 250–300 records → ≈ $2–2.5. Set max_records or the run's "maximum total charge" to cap cost.

Limitations and honesty notes

• Texas publishes issued permits, not pending applications — still weeks before opening, but later than CA/NY/OR.
• Colorado is monthly with a ~5-week lag and some malformed rows upstream (we drop them).
• Washington is intentionally excluded: the LCB list page states the records may not be used for commercial purposes (RCW 42.56.070(8)).
• Oregon records have no county (single address string); enable geocode if you need county filters there.
• Sources occasionally publish late or change layout; the run summary shows per-source counts and request totals.
• No personal data enrichment: we drop phone and mailing-address columns that some agencies publish. Legal-entity names of sole proprietors appear exactly as in the public record.
• Politeness: ≥1 s between API calls, ≥2 s for the CA ABC site, browser-style user agent, no login, no CAPTCHA solving.

Data-source attribution

California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control · New York State Liquor Authority (Open NY) · Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission (Texas Open Data Portal) · Oregon Liquor and Cannabis Commission (Oregon Open Data) · Colorado Department of Revenue Liquor Enforcement Division (Colorado Information Marketplace, public domain) · Missouri Division of Alcohol and Tobacco Control (data.mo.gov) · City of Chicago Department of Business Affairs & Consumer Protection (Chicago Data Portal, see its Terms of Use). This Actor summarizes public records and links back to them; it is not affiliated with any agency.

Using it from an agent / MCP

Add Apify's hosted MCP server to your agent (Claude Desktop, Cursor, VS Code, etc.) with this Actor pre-loaded as a tool:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "apify": {
      "url": "https://mcp.apify.com?tools=tegusdev/us-liquor-license-monitor",
      "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer <YOUR_APIFY_API_TOKEN>" }
    }
  }
}

The agent then calls the Actor with the input described above (pay-per-event charges apply to the account whose token is used). Recommended prompt shape: "Run us-liquor-license-monitor in monitor mode for states CA and TX, on_premise only, days_back 7, and summarize new filings by county." Each dataset item is a flat JSON object, so downstream tools can filter on county, license_type_code or event_type directly.

Scheduling

Create a Task with your input, schedule it daily (07:00 in your timezone works well; CA publishes the previous day's report overnight), and add an integration (webhook → n8n/Make/Zapier, or Slack) on run succeeded that reads the default dataset.