Here at WIRED Science we love craft beer. And being in San Francisco, we're fortunate to have lots of great options nearby.

But sometimes we must travel. And occasionally our travels take us to places where pale yellow swill still reigns. Places where a Newcastle Brown Ale starts to look good. Places where we'd kill for even a Sam Adams.

The horror.

Fortunately, craft beer is on the rise. The New Yorker recently made a nice interactive map illustrating the spread of craft breweries from the West Coast and Northeast into what was once a Bud-drenched dead zone in the middle of the country. (Fun facts: California has the most craft breweries of any state with 316. Alabama, Minnesota, and Connecticut had the greatest percentage increase in craft beer production between 2011-2012. The nation's fastest-growing craft brewery is in Nashville, Tennessee; the next two fastest-growing are in Texas.)

You have reached your destination. Photo: Greg Miller/WIRED

That's nice and all, but what we really need is a way to find a good microbrew when we're on the road. Luckily, there are maps (and apps) for that.

Researching a recent business trip to San Diego (okay, not entirely business), I checked out two of them: The Beer Mapping Project, and Brewery Map. Both utilize Google's map API (short for application programming interface, the set of programming instructions that enables developers to build new websites and apps that tap into an existing website's data and functions), and they're both easy to use: type in a location, and a map and list appear telling you what's nearby. Brewery Map has Android and iPhone apps; several independent apps use the Beer Mapping Project's API.

"The big reason we do what we do is we think it's important, especially with the craft beer culture that's growing, that people get out there and connect with the beer they like to drink, and help promote small businesses making craft beer, and meet the people who are making the kind of beer they like," said Jason Austin, one of the trio of beer-loving developers behind Pint Labs, which created Brewery Map and the database behind it, BreweryDB.com.

Both sites rely on users to enter data, from plugging in the addresses and hours of existing brewpubs to adding new ones as they crop up. That means the sites are more useful in areas with more craft beer drinkers and can be a bit spotty elsewhere. It also means the more people who use them, the better they'll get.

Here's a brief review of their relative strengths and weaknesses:

The Beer Mapping Project. WIRED: Lets you filter search results by type, making it easy to distinguish breweries from brewpubs, bars, and stores that sell microbrew. Click on a pin, and a window pops up with the official website, as well as links to reviews on BeerAdvocate and RateBeer. You can also look up homebrew stores. There are international maps too. TIRED: Beer trip planner isn't very intuitive. Or maybe it doesn't work. I got tired of trying to figure it out.

Brewery Map: WIRED: Great beer trip planner. Plug in two destinations and use a pulldown menu to indicate how far out of your way you're willing to go for microbrew (see map above). TIRED: Designated driver not included. All the pins look the same, so if you want to find, say, a brewpub that serves food, you'll have to do some extra Googling.

I like both these sites, but they could be even better.

I'd love to have better filters so I could zero in on the places that actually serve beer. Not all the breweries listed offer public tastings, for example. That would be nice to know before I go. It would also be helpful to know if a given brewery offers tours – and when. (Austin says Pint Labs is working on some upgrades along these lines).

The beer trip planner on Brewery Map is a great feature. It uses the Google directions API to plot a line between the two points. "We take that, plot it on a map and do some crazy map math to calculate a shape all around the line," Austin said. Then they use the BreweryDB API to search for breweries within that shape and fill them in on the map.

As much as I love this feature, it would be even better if it let you suss out alternate routes by clicking and dragging the line like you can in Google maps. How awesome would it be to drag the line around and find the route that takes you through the most or the most highly-rated craft breweries? Then I could easily plot a southern route from New York to L.A. to check out those rising breweries in Tennessee and Texas, or chart out a meandering drive from San Francisco up to the fantastic Russian River Brewing Company in Santa Rosa, hitting a couple other spots along the way.

"I think that'd be a pretty cool feature," Pint Labs' Garrison Locke said when I asked about it. He says it's technically feasible, but says the team doesn't have any immediate plans to implement it.

Maybe they could be persuaded if they heard from some craft brew-craving WIRED readers. So how about it? If you like the idea, or have a better one, leave it in the comments below or let them know directly.