Need Help Getting Started

Your question seeking help to get started is one that gets asked many times in this forum. The best answer depends on your budget, your brewing arrangements (apartment vs. home where you can brew outdoors vs. indoors), and fermentation conditions i.e. the ability to place your fermentor in an area where the ambient temp is around 65 degrees (and I see that you are in Texas where that might be difficult in the summer).

Page backward in this forum to find threads that will give you that initial help to get answers, or do some searches to find threads that directly answer your needs. Here is a link to the results of a search that I did using 'equipment' as the search word and looking only at thread titles. http://www.beeradvocate.com/community/search/32642113/?q=equipment&o=date&c[title_only]=1&c[node]=8 You could also do searches using 'newbie' or 'kits' to find other threads that might help.

If you haven't read John Palmer's book www.howtobrew.com yet, that is a great starting place too. It is free to read online, or you can purchase the later edition ($11-$15 at Amazon) so that you have something to highlight, write notes, etc. The Complete Joy of Homebrewing by Charlie Papazian is another great source per many recommendations that I've seen.

 

http://www.beeradvocate.com/community/threads/best-homebrewers-kit.422215/#post-4842982 from a few days ago.

 

Hey @jbakajust1 or another admin/moderator...Is there any way that a folder or post can be pinned to the top of the forum called something to the effect of "So you want to start homebrewing? Start here and read these threads first!" and then provide a multitude of previous threads that have already answered the usual newbie questions? The " New to Homebrewing" post pops up multiple times weekly and they usually get the same responses about How To Brew and searching for old threads that already answer the usual questions. There are a lot of kind homebrewers on here that usually help them, but eventually some of them (including myself) stop replying because it happens too often, I personally think it would free up the forum a little bit for real brewing questions and make sure everyone that wants to start, gets the same quality response.

Just curious

 

@Beertelligence -- more info will probably help get you some direct answers. @Mothergoose03 mentioned at the start of his post some different possibilities you need to narrow down, and I think if you do, you will get some direct answers rather than suggestions to do a search (but use the search anyhow!).

Where do you want to be when you start? There are minimalist brewing setups (plastic buckets, turkey fryers, brew in a bag, cooler mash tuns) and there are fancy set-ups -- conical fermenters, RIMs and HERMs systems, Blichmann top tier). You can start small and build up, you can start small and stay small, or you can skip small and start big. What are you looking for?