A reader who goes by “Lurk” writes in: “Heard ‘pub crawl’ used in a U.S. TV programme today, “Law & Order”. Series 19 (2008-2009), episode 13 about half way through. Struck me as unusual.”
Lurk identifies himself or herself as British, but I already knew that, what with “programme” (instead of “program”), “series” (“season”), and the period outside quotation marks. In any case, “pub crawl” was actually on my mind, as I had recently come upon it in H.L. Mencken’s The American Language. In the 1945 edition, Mencken writes that most “Briticisms” in America are pretentious borrowings, such as “swank,” “swagger,” and “master bedroom.” However, he says, “Plenty of Briticisms, especially on the level of slang, deserve American adoption better than any of the shaky borrowings from the English upper classes, e.g., ‘pub crawl,’ (a tour of drinking spots).”
The OED defines the expression as “A visit to a succession of pubs with drinks at each one” and has three citations. They show a familiar progression:
- Phrase in quotation marks: “We did a ‘pub-crawl’ in Commercial Road and East India Dock Road.”–T. Burke, Nights in Town, 1915
- No quotation marks but hyphenated: “Simon Fleet had arranged a pub-crawl of the East End.”–Cecil. Beaton, Diary 9 February 1964, in Self Portrait with Friends (1979)
- Unhyphenated: “A visit to London wouldn’t be complete without a stop at the famous Ceeps, a must-do on any pub crawl.”
That last one, from 1992, mentions “London” but it’s actually from a London, Ontario, newspaper and is about that city.
As for “pub crawl” in the U.S., I have a pretty strong feeling I heard it before 2008. There’s confirmation of that in two 1970s uses in the New York Times. In a 1975 column, the great Russell Baker wrote fancifully that in the pages of Esquire magazine, “Dante Gabriel Rossetti always seems to be jogging with Muhammad Ali while Norman Mailer is on a pub crawl with Vergil.”
And this is from a 1977 article about then-California Governor Jerry Brown:
[Voters] seem to accept the Governor’s desire to spend a few weekend hours at the Zen center in San Francisco, or his penchant, as a bachelor who will he 40 years old next April 7. for visiting such: sections as San Francisco’s topless bar area, North Beach, accompanied by Linda Ronstadt. the singer.
The North Beach date was no pub crawl; instead, Mr. Brown took Miss Ronstadt to the City Lights Bookstore, a relic of the beatnik years. where he bought a copy of “The Catholic Worker” and one of Henry Miller’s “My Life in New York.”
Nowadays, contra Lurk, American pub-crawls are a commonplace. Look at the results I got when I Googled the term. (Google is customizing it for me since I live outside Philadelphia.)
Mencken would be pleased.
notoneoffbritishisms.com 
Boulder, Colorado – where I live – has a pedestrian mall, created on the downtown section of the city’s historic Pearl Street. Often, people go out on a “mall crawl,” visiting the many saloons that line the mall. Has a nice ring to it.
Sounds reasonable though there is a slight misinterpretation of the term. “Pub crawl” and “bar crawl” both imply moving from one pub or bar to numerous others, whereas Boulder’s “mall crawl” occurs within a single mall. Strictly speaking, it is a “saloon crawl”.
While I agree that this is a term that’s been in American for at least a few decades, when I try to remember MY earliest encounter with the term, I believe it was in Gibraltar in 1989. So, while I always considered it an American term (even with “pub”), I was probably wrong about that.
The Edgar Wright film The World’s End features five not-young-any-more friends whose reunion in their home town takes the form of a legendary 12-stop pub crawl nicknamed The Golden Mile, where each pub name (or in some cases sign) plausibly matches the current state of the plot. It starts with the First Post (the first pub) and ends with The World’s End itself (which our heroes visit at the culmination of an alien invasion) and includes on the way The Two-Headed Dog (where there’s a fight with twins) and The Hole in the Wall (where a car crashes into the pub). https://oracleoffilm.com/2013/10/02/the-meanings-behind-the-12-pubs-in-the-worlds-end/ for someone who is trying to figure out all the allusions.