Thanks Again! I will check out those places as well as the place in Woodland Hills you mentioned. All are about the same distance.
silenus, thanks so much for the recipes and the info. I guess I understand what you are saying – some people do not know the difference between boiling and simmering, you are talking about simmering, but the recipes I have seen say to boil. That is a good thing to know. Do you buy your honey from a particular person or what? Like I said, since I am within a few minutes’ (2 hours roundtrip at worst) drive of several Mennonite and Amish communities, I will probably start there, but I would eventually like to branch out to gourmet honey (such as I heard about some clary sage honey – that sounds divine, just for eating even!).
I get my honey from a variety of local sources. Look up “Honey” or “Beekeeping” in the Yellow Pages for some potential sources of supply. But starting with the Amish/Mennonites is probably your best bet. If they can tell you the blossoms the bees were collecting from, you can start mixing/matching flavors to compliment. The lighter the honey, the more you can mess with it. Heavy, flavorful honeys should be used for straight mead, with no flavorings other than the honey. I’d also make these a lot heavier than a wildflower mead.
Don’t be afraid to experiment with yeasts. Champagne yeast is fairly neutral, while Sherry yeast will give you a distinct flavor. Various wine yeasts fit along a spectrum of flavor. Have fun deciding what works best for whatever your ingredients are.
As soon as you walk in the door… you’ll know.
In the Southern NH/Northeast MA area, there are basically 3 shops…
One is big, and specializes in mail order. They have everything, but it’s tough to find someone to spend time talking to you.
Another is small, has 99.8% of the things you would need, and is easy to find the one guy that works there to talk over a plan/recipe/process.
The last is filthy, difficult to navigate, and I’m sure the guy is full of great information, but it’s tough to figure out what is BS, and what is on target.
I go to the 2nd one most often, but if I have a complicated recipe, I go to the first. The third, I will never return to.
I think this is good advice. I sort of figured out having experience in other “hobbies” - (must be getting old) that I would skip the el-cheapo kits as likely being too much of a compromise. “Do it right” doesn’t have to cost much more. At the other extreme there are often spousal issues here as well, so buying a boatload of electronic yeast stirrers and other professional brewgear can cause problems with the family budget. A new hobby approached correctly - and maybe mr or mrs spouse will become a participant, not a critic! “Honey, this hefe is great!” etc.
The big issue I found was the necessity of performing 5 gallon boils. Trashing out the kitchen is not the way to endear oneself to anyone. A propane burner and a stainless 5 gallon brewpot makes short work of this necessary task and it can and should be done somewhere else.
Get this book:
The Complete Joy of Homebrewing, by Charlie Papazian.
It has everything you need to know about what equipment to buy and how to get started in homebrewing. It’s the beginning homebrewer’s bible. Every homebrewer I know, myself included, started with this book.
If you’re too cheap to buy the book that romansperson suggests (I would also suggest that) 
…
Read this web-site while you’re investigating your options. It’s a great “homebrewing 101” course. I think it’s a slightly earlier edition of the current “How To Brew” book advertised on the main page.
Once you decide to brew, the Papazian book is a requirement.
For equipment, get the medium to advanced kit. It’s worth it in the long run.
Visit www.homebrewtalk.com it’s a great site, one that I’m on ALL the time for some of the basic information that I always seem to forget. Great conversations and ideas over there. Anything from setup & process through recipies and equipment.
You know you’re really a homebrewer when you’ve figured out where Papazian is full of it, too. 
But CJOH is a great starter book, and like romansperson said, almost every homebrewer in the country started with it.
I should also have added: Join a homebrew club! You get to taste each other’s beers and swap recipes and techniques. Experienced homebrewers in your area are a great resource.
Tennesee homebrew clubs:
Wow, such great advice! Since this is a hobby that my spouse and I both are wanting to pick up, there won’t be issues with getting what we need. I will check out the books mentioned. As for the kits – it looks like I have only an option of 2 – not really a cheap vs an expensive one, but it looks like ale vs wine. I will probably make a trip to the homebrewing stores within the next few weeks and see what they suggest as far as equipment, and go from there.
We still need to try to find our cave, but that should be a great way to keep the fermenting mead at a constant temperature – wish us luck in finding it! What does everyone else do to keep the fermenting brew at a constant temperature?
Well for beer, I either brewed during the winter or used an old chext freezer with an over-ride thermostat on it. For mead I never bothered. Mead can tolerate much higher fermentation temperatures that malt beverages can. Stick it in a cool, dark closet somewhere and forget it for a few years (keeping the airlock filled constantly, of course!)
I thought I’d chime in to say that while there is a good deal of info regarding mead on the Internet, and at its most basic it’s not enough to require heavy reading, you would be well served to pick up a copy of Ken Schramm’s The Compleat Meadmaker (yes, compleat not complete) if you are interested in brewing up some mead. This book is fairly widely considered to have set the standard for books about mead, despite having been published only a few years ago.
Let me add that mead costs can be driven down considerably by buying bulk honey directly from an apiary. I just received a 60lb (5gal) pail of Orange Blossom Honey from http://www.dutchgoldhoney.com in PA for 90+16shipping. That’s about $1.75/lb, compared to $4+/lb, which is the best I can do at my local supermarket.
I’m sure there’s some local beekeepers around you in TN. You can use the Honey Locator to find one near you.
Regarding beer - though you asked about cost, I don’t think I saw much in the way of that in previous posts, so let me give a quick rundown.
----Ingredients----
Assuming you’re doing an extract kit (malt extract, a pound or so of grains to steep in the water, hops, yeast), that’ll run you about $25-30 for a little under 5 gallons (you start w/ 5gals, but you lose some along the way), so about 42 bottles maybe.
Brewing all-grain beer (that is, no extract) is actually considerably less expensive in terms of ingredients, but the start-up equipment costs jump a bit.
When brewing all-grain beer, I buy my base grain (pilsener malt or pale malt usually) in 55lb sacks, which cost about $30-35, and normally use 8-12lbs of grain per 5 gallon batch. Usually there’s a pound of three of some specialty grains that I’ll use also, which aren’t used often enough to buy in bulk and cost about $1.50-2.00/lb. That makes for maybe $10 for the grain bill. Add another 1-3oz of hops, depending on style, which go for about $1.50-2.00/oz, and a packet of yeast ($1-2), or liquid yeast (way more variety, but costs about $6-8. The 2 liquid yeast companies you’ll generally find at brick-and-mortar and online homebrew shops are Wyeast and White Labs - note that though liquid yeast is expensive, it can be recycled from batch to batch, driving down the cost. This can be done with dry yeast packets as well but I don’t know of anyone that bothers). For a simple (cheap) recipe, you can get down to about $10/5gal.
—Equipment—
For extract brewing, you’ll need:
- A big pot capable of holding 3-4 or so gallons. If you don’t have this, you can often find them in thrift stores for a few bucks. I’ve found enamel-coated canning pots, which hold about 4 gallons, to be pretty common.
- A fermenter of some sort - this is where the beer will ferment. As someone said, you can use a water-cooler jug if you have access to one. Alternatively, you can buy a plastic fermentor bucket at a homebrew shop for $10-15. This is a food-grade bucket, normally sold in 6.5 and 7.9 gallon sizes at homebrew shops that has a lid with a drilled and grommeted hole for insertion of an airlock. You can also ask around a local restaurant (diners are good for this) for a food-grade bucket. They get lots of stuff (pickles, mayo, etc) in them and generally throw them out. If going this route, make sure of 2 things - A) that the bucket really was used for food, since they sometimes ship soap and other nasties in similar buckets, and B) that the bucket doesn’t/won’t smell when clean. I’ve gotten some buckets originally used to store olives that quite obviously are never going to lose that smell, and I’ve just finished fermenting a raspberry wine that smells mildly of pickles.
Instead of using a bucket, you could also use a glass carboy (like a water cooler jug, but made of glass). These cost about $20 in a homebrew shop and become necessary (more or less) if you want to age beer/wine/mead for any significant amount of time. Usually this is done with high-alcohol ales and all lagers. - Clear plastic hose. 6 feet of 3/8inch IN (inner diameter). This is used for siphoning beer should cost about $3 bucks at a hardware store/Home Depot/Lowe’s.
- air lock. $1 from any homebrew shop. This little doohickey attaches to your fermenter, allowing gas from inside to escape and preventing outside (potentially beer-spoiling) air from getting in.
- A racking tube - this is a plastic tube used for siphoning, and costs about $2 at a homebrew shop.
- A bottling wand - $2. This is a plastic tube with a spring-loaded attachment that helps with bottling by keeping the (beer-filled) tube shut until it is activated by hitting the bottom of an empty beer bottle, opening the tube and allowing beer to fill the bottle.
- Bottle capper - $10-15. This device crimps crown caps onto beer bottles and American champagne bottles, which take a regular crown cap. Some cappers can be converted to crimp oversized caps onto European champagne bottle. These caps are somewhat larger and less regularly available.
- Bottle caps - about $3 for 150 or so.
- Bottling bucket - Basically a fermenter bucket (see above) with a plastic spigot attached to the bottom. Make your own with a bucket and a $3 spigot or get one ready-made at a homebrew shop for about $12-15.
- Bottles - You have a few options here. If you are lazy/don’t like cleaning, you can buy 2 cases of empty bottles from your homebrew shop for $12-20. You can also get bottles from most beverage distributors, or even a bar, for about the cost of the deposit on them, but these will need to be cleaned of old beer and usually mold, which is a royal PITA - if you go this route, make sure to only get non-twistoff bottles. You can of course save your own beer bottles, rinsing them out immediately after you drain them so that you only need to disinfect, not clean, when it comes time to bottle. Finally, you might be able to find a bar that serves Grolsch flip-top bottles, and buy some empties from the bar. This is a somewhat convenient route and gets rid of the need for a bottle capper and bottle caps, though Grolsch’s green glass is suboptimal, since it allows light to enter, which over time will cause your beer to become lightstruck (they’ll taste skunky, just like grolsch, heineken, and other green and clear bottled beers usually do).
- A sanitizer of some sort. Bleach is cheap and works well, but make sure you wash it out.
— Optional Equipment —
- Bottle washer. $8. A faucet attachment that REALLY simplifies bottle cleaning
- Bottle brush/Carboy brush. These things cost a few bucks and help with cleaning somewhat.
- Hydrometer - $5-8 - this device measures the density (specific gravity) of your wort (unfermented beer) and beer, measurements which can be used to calculate your beers ABV as well as allowing you to track the progress of fermentation more closely.
- Stick-on thermometer. $2 - allow you to keep track of fermentation temperature.
—Keeping a constant temperature—
This is not as big a problem as it might seem since beer yeast is relatively tolerant of temperature change, within a reasonable limit. If you have a place that’s more or less 70degrees you’re fine. A basement helps with temperature regulation. Wine, Mead, and aged beers will do better at a temperature somewhat lower than room-temperature. If you are worried about your temperature being too high during the week or two of primary fermentation, and you have a carboy (plastic or glass), you can cover the carboy with a wet t-shirt, periodically wetting it down. The evaporation will cool your wort down 5-10 degrees. This is advice is throw around homebrewing boards quite a bit, but I’ve never had the need to use it. As for winter-time brewing, you can buy a heating belt that goes around your carboy/bucket for about $20.
—Resources—
http://www.morebeer.com, More Beer, a major california-based homebrewing supply company with free shipping on orders over $60
http://www.northernbrewer.com, Northern Brewer, a midwest(?) based supply company.
Both of the above will have just about anything you need.
Northern Brewer Forums The guys here will be able to answer just about any question you have. I’m aenik there, though I haven’t been logging on very regularly recently.
Finally - how long will it take you to get good? Well, my first beer was an extract kit for a Pale Ale, and it came out wonderful. Your process improves with time, sure, but assuming you don’t have any disasters the first go around, you should be able to produce a good beer better than most store-bought stuff on your first try. I’d highly recommend an extract kit (with separate hops, not hopped extract) to start with. Also, keep it simple your first time or three around. Keep the oak-aged bourbon vanilla imperial porter (I’m just about to bottle this 8 month brew) and similar recipes on hold until you feel a little more comfortable with the basics fo the brewing process.
OK, that must be this place.
So which one is here and which one is here?
I’ll tell you which one I use… 
My wife recently got sick of our kitchen refrigerator and bought a new one. Guess who inherited the (perfectly functional) old fridge, which is now down in the basement?
**Laughing Lagomorph **, you got the mailorder/big place exactly right.
In the interest of fighting ignorance, this is the store that I go to most often. IMO the best for the type of brewing I currently do, and certainly the most convienent to me as far as travel.
This one to which I will never return.
The Cambridge & Beverly stores are a bit too far from my normal travels for me to use as a “regular” store. Worth knowing about if they are something special though.
Which is your “regular,” so that I can avoid the other?
Another tip-
An auto-siphon. Start your siphons easy, with no sucking of sterilized water or any other tricky manuvers. It’s a basic racking tube that fits into a wider tube, with a plunger collar. The decrease in diameter yields an increas in pressure, so the beer rockets up and over the rack.
Well, I’ve never been to the Beverly store so I can’t say a thing about it either way. I was just trying to guess based on your clues.
The Modern Brewer in Cambridge is my usual place but I have to say I don’t think it is as good as it used to be. The staff is usually helpful but I worry about the cleanliness of the place. It changed ownership about 5 years ago, the original owners did a great job. They do have a very complete selection of beer and winemaking supplies though.
I went to the place in Marlborough MA (not sure it is open anymore) and was thoroughly unimpressed, even though I had heard other people say good things about it.
I also tried to go to this place once and couldn’t even find it. I think it was being run out of someone’s house.
What he said.
Now, excuse me, while I go dump some Campden Tablets into a clean carboy for racking my Film Yeast hosting cider onto.
sigh