Buying mixes or making your own
 

I have been buying the mix with everything I need to brew, they seem to cost me about the same as buying beer.
Im thinking about looking up a recipe and then buying the grains, hops and yeast separately, Is that what most people do?
and where is the best place to go to do that?
(I dont have a brew store near me)

I don't know about most, but certainly a lot. I suspect there are as many extract + specialty as all grainers.

Just about every outlet that sells kits, also sells grain, crushed or not. Often you'll end up buying more than you need, not everyone sells less than 1 lb quantities.

The upside to that is, you brew something fun after you have a little grain & hop collection going.

If you brew a lot, consider finding a group buy, and get a 50 lb sack of base grain.

buing in bulk(grain/hops) will save lots. If you get away from all extract kits your price will go down as well. Washing/reusing yeast will save you as well.

I am brewing all grain right now with kits i bought from the Brooklyn brew shop.
Im just not sure what grains to buy, and what else apart from hops and yeast I will need or how to do it.

The recipe section of this forum has tons. With extract and specialty grains. You have a lot of options...

Additionally there are some winner tried and true recipes that you can find by clicking on the Recipes under a persons name on the left side. You get some really good ones from the big names

Thanks for the help guys, I didnt even see the recipe section :rolleyes:
Seems like I have lots of reading ahead of me, and I guess i need to step up from 1 gal brews, I have a 3 gallon mash tun to start me off will that only be good for 1 gallon brews?

I strongly recommend reading some books on this subject. This site and the 'net in general has a lot of good information, but there are a lot of approaches to recipe creation. Getting a single, coherent voice on the subject can help when you're starting out. Palmer's How to Brew book (online, or the more recent print versions, which has some substantial revisions) is a good start, and Daniels' Designing Great Beers has detailed information about malts, hops, and how to combine these to match popular styles.

Before that, you can by all means grab a recipe from this site and run with it, but I'd be cautious about deviating from it until you have a sense for what the various malts are like. There are a bazillion ways to combine malts and end up with great beer, but there are also some silly batch-ruining mistakes you can make if you aren't familiar with some basics and decide to substitute light crystal malt in place of your 2-row...

A 3 gallon tun should be fine for 1 gallon all-grainbrews, or you can do partial mashes and make bigger batches without bigger equipment.

Thanks Zeg, I have one book so far, my plan was to get used to using the mash tun and then get a bigger one and use the 3 gallon tun for something else, maybe do new beers in that so if they go wrong im only losing a small batch.