Great topic!
I love beer, but started thinking about brewing after trying my first mead at a wine festival here in Virginia last year. So I started with mead. I actually will recommend against starting with mead as honey is a hell of a lot more expensive than other fermenting products, especially with Colony Collapse Disorder messing with the supply.
I actually started out with a simple mead but tried to take a shortcut on the equipment side to keep the costs down and almost created a mead grenade!
I used a growler that I had from my local micro-brewery/restaurant and tried to brew in there. Being conscious about contamination I clamped the thing down and did not even think about the CO2 produced by the fermenting. Thankfully the rubber gasket got popped out by the pressure about a week later and I heard it, otherwise the presure could have kept building and cause the whole damn thing to explode. It erupted when i took the lid off anyway, but better that than flying shards of glass.
I have done about three one-gallon batches of mead so far and drank them. I don't have a carboy so my batches are a bit on the small side, but I am going to save some cash to get a full brewing setup. Right now I use some more improv methods that I have read other mead makers use. Just a plastic purified water container (can use the water in the brewing too which is good) add the ingredients and top with a balloon with a hole poked in it to vent gas. It is not the best setup, but it works while I am still getting the hang of things. I have three meads brewing at the moment and decided to try making some apple-jack, so I have two of those brewing at the moment. Two of the meads are just straight mead, wildflower honey, one is dry, the other is sweet. The third mead is an apple cinnamon cyzer. I have high hopes for that one, it smells frickin' awesome, but time will tell.
Finally, I decided to try brewing up some apple-jack because the components are cheap and it might be interesting. I grabbed a couple of those jugs of apple juice from the store, dropped some yeast in and set them to ferminting. Already racked once on those (the primary fermenting went ape shit fast) and fortified with some added organic cane sugar because the yeast consumed everything in the juice in about a week. Secondary fermentation was still running strong after two weeks when i checked two days ago, but I should be able to freeze distill soon for some nice apple spirits (which is not legal so SHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!)
