If you’re not already aware, many brewpubs and some breweries across the United States have the ability to sell you “growlers” of their house brewed beer for you to take home and enjoy. Typically, a growler holds 64 ounces and in many occasions you can bring them back for refills (a refill price is often cheaper than a first fill because you are paying for the glass container).

So, we’ve learned that a growler that you purchase today is a reusable container full of beer that comes from a business that is local to you. Who wouldn’t like that?

If you have a brewpub nearby (search here), we’re urging you to visit it and ask for a growler of their finest beer to-go. It’s Saturday, and nothing goes better with a Saturday than some fresh locally brewed beer!

If you use twitter, tag your tweets with #growlerday so we can see who is able to buy fresh craft beer today!

Welcome to the Beer Mapping Project. We hope to help you find your next beer by showing you beer locations around you or around your potential destination. Use the search features on the top of this screen to find the location of places that you might already know about. Or if you want to find out what is near a certain spot on a map, use the lookup on the right of this screen.

Enjoy and be safe.

We’re going to make this really easy for you guys to enter. All you have to do is comment on this post and tell us what the last Wisconsin beer you drank was.

If you haven’t heard of it, this is the Second Annual Wisconsin Beer Lovers Festival. Here’s what they have to say on their website.

“Join us for the Wisconsin Beer Lovers Festival on Saturday, June 18, 2011 at Bayshore Town Center in Glendale, Wis. (Father’s Day weekend)

The Wisconsin Brewer’s Guild, Draft Magazine and the City of Glendale welcome you to experience the second annual all-Wisconsin craft beer and tasting festival. Enjoy more than 100 of Wisconsin’s finest craft beers and sample specially prepared cuisine designed to complement more than 20 unique beers from our state’s finest craft breweries. Meet the brew masters and chefs behind the creations and spend the afternoon enjoying the sights and sounds of Bayshore Town Center.”

If you don’t trust your chances, you can also go ahead and buy your tickets here. There will be some people from Beer Mapping at the fest, so if you go, look around and maybe we’ll buy you a free sample!

We will pick two random winners at 12pm CDT on June 15th.

A GABF Medal Infographic from Lyke2Drink (click for source).

Basically, the rules are simple. To properly complete the challenge, you will only drink beer produced in the state where you are currently drinking. This means that if you have a trip planned to Colorado during June, you will have to consume only beer brewed in Colorado while you are there.

If you aren’t planning to leave your home state during June, then you will have to be satisfied with the selection your state produces. Obviously, this is only for fun. If someone shows up at your house with an eight year vertical of Dark Lord, no one will expect you to abstain. BUT, we think this is a great time to switch your focus to your local craft brewers (and tell others about it as well).

If you need help finding out breweries, brewpubs or great beer bars to visit during June, obviously you’ve come to the right place! Spend some time creating searches or maps on our Location Lookup page.

If you’re active on twitter or facebook, spread the word. If you tweet about the beers you drink or about the June State Beer challenge, try to use the hashtag, #statebeer so others can follow along.

Will YOU accept the challenge?

Please let us know in the comments. And make sure if you comment, you let us know what state you will be representing.

At 7pm the first of five special casks will be getting wacked with the hammer. Come out and hang out with Beer Mappers and our friends over at the Hop Cast. There will be more details coming, but for now, mark up your calendar in pen!

Or just add it to your facebook events!

Five more years?

First off, the maps now have a nice blue top navigation bar. This navigation takes the place of the floating “main menu” from the older version of the maps. You’ll see that we’ve added the location lookup on the far right of the screen and we have more space up there to add more links to important parts of the site.

Map Legend

In the top left, you’ll see our logo and the hideable legend should appear pretty much like it used to. You can still click the “x” to hide and you can click the names/pins in the legend to hide specific types of locations.

City Map Selection

When looking for a city map, you’ll realize that they are now grouped by regions and hovering over a region will produce a flyout dropdown allowing you to select the city you are interested in.

Registered User Functions

People viewing the maps that are not registered and logged into the site will often get a reduced number of features. If in the top right you see the “login/register” links, this means you are not logged in. Click the links to do so.

When you are logged in, on many of our maps (City Maps and Proximity Maps) you will get extra links via little green and red colored buttons that will allow you to only see locations you have reviewed or locations you haven’t reviewed on a certain map. These links will allow you to plot the next location you may want to visit or help to find a location that you may have forgotten to review.

Toggles and Traffic

Note: If you are looking for the toggles to turn on or off the location list or the legend, those are up in the top right under the map selectors (view image above). We have also added the “traffic” layer to many of the maps, allowing you to plan your trips a bit better.

We hope you enjoy these new features and the new styling of the maps. Please let us know what you think by leaving a comment here or by posting in the forums (or replying to us on twitter @beermapping).

All applications are developed by third party developers and the apps listed here are built off of Beer Mapping’s Application Programming Interface (API). This means that if you decide to purchase one of these apps, you are giving money to the third party developer and your money is not going to Beer Mapping. These developers spent time creating these apps and in most cases the applications are priced at an extremely reasonable fee.

Check it out at beermapping.com/apps.

We hope to see you there! Wear your Beer Mapping t-shirt (or make you own!) and we’ll buy you a pint!

Well, the big news today is that we now appear to be showing up in the “reviews” section for some beer locations when people are searching Google Maps. In our opinion, this is a pretty big deal.

As you can see from the image above (click image to see live google result page), they are pulling contents from one of our reviews for the location and displaying it for people searching for that location. We’re sharing this honor with other sites like Citysearch, Metromix, Urbanspoon, Insiderpages and Google’s own in house review system.

We’re excited about this and will probably be searching google all day looking for new examples! Please let us know in the comments if you find any!

We are working on the problems and we hope to have the server back up and running the way it is supposed to very soon. Many links on the site will not work, the forums seem to be cooperating properly, but Location Lookup and many other important functions are broken at this time.

Thanks for your patience.