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Would love to be able to brew my own brews too. Sounds like a lot of fun. How'd you get into that?
I generally hang with a do-it-yourself crowd of freaks, into everything from grow your own food, herbs, etc. to build your own computer, house, car etc. So, brew your own was a common project (some do wine &/or moonshine whiskey, too).
Anyway, I've always been a fair to pretty decent cook. Once you see how to cook up a batch, it's fairly trivial. I got a copy of
Snyder's Brewmaster's Bible (which is trivial to download in *.pdf these days, see link). Discovered that teh usenetz haz alt.beer and a rec.beer (and others) and spent a few years downloading recipes & interacting with other brewers around the world.
Properly set up, you can set a batch ready to ferment in about three hours, plus an hour of clean up. Ferment for three to six days (or many other possibilities depending on what you're making), then "rack" it (decant the beer off into a container without all the sediment) for another two to five days. Spike it with some proper beer sugar (or honey) and bottle it. Start drinking in two to six weeks depending on what you made. Total time investment is about 10 hours over 8 - 10 weeks, generally speaking for common & easy beers.
If you're smart about it, you can set up good basic equipment for under $100, then about $35 to $45 for ingredients per batch. I used 7 gallon plastic buckets ... so, say at today's prices $50 for 7 gallons = ~75 x 12 oz. bottles. If you play around a bit, you can usually squeeze an extra couple bottles out of it and yield ~80, so you're under $0.65 per bottle. And it's premium microbrew.
So, yeah, I got into it because I couldn't find or buy beer for love or money that was better than anything I made, and I could get it down to ~50¢ per bottle (circa 1995-2000). Would trade six packs with friends, so everyone would usually have five to ten varieties on hand at any time you visit, and you never quite knew what there would be, but it was all pretty fantastic. It really helps if you've got a small circle of friends all into it because you can keep yeast cultures alive and help collect bottles and scrounge/share other equipment, etc. etc. to keep costs very low. And wide variety always available.
