Dude, you are overthinking this and I'm speaking from experience here, but if you don't know one way or the other, you have to make some sort of a move. I dunno whether its best for you to ask him or her for a drink and 'see what happens' or drop subtle hints or just be upfront about it, but you have to do something and then if you are rejected then there are other fish in the sea.
Otherwise, the longer you leave it, the weirder it gets. Once you have become good friends, you are no longer asking them out for a casual drink, you are asking them for a serious relationship.
I have not been able to find anything about the prior of someone being in love with you.
You're just asking them out for a drink. That's all. Unless you are following 19th century social norms, you are allowed to go out with someone you are not yet in love with, and while falling in love may take time, generally people make up their minds about whether they find each other attractive pretty quickly.
If you have a crush on someone you usually want to find out if they have one on you too. In my opinion outright asking them is often not a good solution, because if they don't have a crush on you yet it decreases the chance of this ever happening if they know you have one. This believe is based on what I read about love psychology. Hovever I don't really want to discuss the option of outright asking them in this thread, therefore I have not elaborated further how I got to this believe.
The alternative to asking them is trying to interpret signals that they might give you. However to know how many signals you need before you should believe that they are in love with you, you would need the prior. I have not been able to find anything about the prior of someone being in love with you. Therefore my Idea is to do a survey in order to find out how likely it is that a person you know has a crush on you. The plan is to ask the person taking the survey how many people they know well enough to possibly have a crush on them and how many people they actually have a crush on.
I have created a Survey for this and would be really happy if you would participate.
The next stepp would be to discuss how certain signals a person can give you raise the probability of them having a crush on you. That part is quite difficult. I think probably the best way would be to check how your friends react to certain situations and what body language they show you and then, if you find out someone has a crush on you, to look up what he did differently from people who are merely your friends. I am currently not in a good position to do this experiment but if someone wants to try or has results about this to share please do so. However I think this part is less important than finding the prior, because most people have at least a general idea about what certain signals mean from personal experience while at least I have no idea at all what the prior might be.