Wow, I really sparked a massive thread here! Thanks all for the tips and feedback. Some really great ideas here for me to think about. Just wanted to answer some of the questions that kept popping up:
1. My benchmark currently is I can buy two packs of my favorite beer from my local craft brewery which works out to $40/gallon. No I'm not drinking Bud or anything like that.
2. I'm doing all-grain, no extracts. However, one thing I should have mentioned is because I'm just starting out, and wasn't sure about my recipes or techniques, I didn't want to commit to full batches, so I scaled recipes to half-batches. Currently yielding about 2 gallons per batch which is coming out to about $35 per batch, give or take. Not counting equipment investment.
3. My first batch didn't turn out well, it was super astringent, and I've been researching what could have caused that. We have terrible water where I live. Off the scale hard, and extremely caustic. But I used filtered tap water for my first batch and wanted to absolutely eliminate water as the possible cause of the astringency, so for batch 2 I used distilled (at 2.99 per gal) and built it back up, which I realize is pretty advanced for where I'm at as a brewer. I don't expect to always use distilled.