To the OP:
What kind of beer are you looking to brew?
If you are unfamiliar with formulating recipes or the grain-steeping process, try an extract w/ specialty grains kit from your LHBS or one of the many online retailers. I suggest basic ale (mild, pale, amber, red, brown, porter, or stout, or if you like bud/pbr type beers a cream ale) or wheat beer.
Morebeer,
Northern Brewer, and
Austin Homebrew all have good kits (northern brewer even posts their kit recipes). Your LHBS may also carry the "
true brue" or "
brewers best" kits, these kits in my experience include quality ingredients. I think all the kits listed above are typically for a five gallon batch instead of a 3 gallon batch, and some of them require you to also order yeast (good dry yeasts are affordable though). There are lots of threads on this forum on which kits are best, so search around to learn from other peoples' experience! If you like your results, it's a very easy step to start tweaking recipes to your liking.
If you are concerned about the price of a 5gal batch of real ale, I would recommend finding a recipe for a 5 gallon batch of a style you are interested in (Northern Brewer website or this forum are good places to start), and then stepping it down to 3 gal (multiply the amounts of extract, specialty grains, spices, malto-dextrin, and bittering hops by 0.6, but leave irish moss and aroma hops the same), and then go to your LHBS and buy that stuff there to save on shipping. You should be able to crack your specialty grains in a mill at the LHBS. Don't be suprised if you decide to step back up to 5 gal batches once you taste the difference of using quality ingredients!
Hope this is helpful, sorry for the long post.
