I realize this thread is a bit old but I figure I'll throw my 2 cents in for anyone else that might come across it.
1st up, the only Homebrew store in Wichita that's strictly a homebrew store is "What's Brewin".
Adequate would be the gracious term for it. The store itself has most everything you'd need, but they don't really do anything to make it look like they care about the store. It looks like they paid their rent, moved in some shelves (or just used some that were abandoned in there), a refrigeration unit, and called it good. If they vacuum the carpet you can't tell. The front-most area of the store looks like some kind of overflow bottle storage. The staff are reasonably knowledgeable I believe, but they also seem vaguely disinterested in customers and there's usually at least one person surfing the net behind the counter that will be annoyed if anyone has to ask them a question.
The store reeks of apathy. It's like everyone there studied brewing for the job, but no one seems to actually enjoy it.
Now the Johnson's Greenhouse on west 13th Street has brewing supplies. They have a MUCH smaller area for it than What's Brewing and I haven't really gotten a chance to play "stump the staff" yet so I don't know how knowledgeable they are, but of course some of them know nothing because they're plant people, and at least one of the brewing guys was asking me advice about pitching yeast but I got the impression there was some other guy who wasn't in that day who was the expert.
Their selection is a bit narrower but they seem to have most everything, just a bit fewer of them. Some stuff they don't have, like glass carboys (that I could see) but they have lots of Better Bottles. I've only been there twice so the jury is still out on that.
Their store is clean, it's decorated, and it definitely looks like the owners and employees give a $#!+ about the business.
All that said, I would greatly welcome a real, respectable homebrew store here. Provided you can keep the prices even vaguely competitive with Midwest Supply I would entirely stop ordering online. To be perfectly honest a big part of the reason I still shop at Midwest is that even from several hundred miles away they make me feel more at home and more valued than the people at What's Brewing do. So the only time I set foot in What's Brewing was when I needed to buy something I didn't want to wait on shipping for (and the prices between the two, including shipping, are usually about the same and some things are much cheaper at Midwest even after I pay for shipping.)
Generally speaking I'm perfectly happy to pay a little more to walk into a store, talk to someone face to face if I have questions, and walk out with something that same day that I was able to look at, hold, and compare close-up with the various options. It's when something I can buy for $50 plus $12 shipping costs over $70 that I'm back at home on the computer buying stuff.
All that said, there's a chance I'll be moving to Manhattan shortly, in which case I would prefer a homebrew store open there.
