My process has been to approach it just like brewing ale from extract. Since you're coming from a mead background, here's my quick rundown of what this means:
- Do a boil of water for somewhere between 30-60 minutes
- Add bittering hops early in the boil - how much/what kind is recipe-specific
- Add flavor/aroma hops later in the boil - again, varies based on recipe
- Add extracts (honey, brown rice syrup) later in the boil - I've been doing the last 15 minutes - varies based on recipe
- Cool wort (I use a stopped sink and fill it with ice packs) down to near room temperature
- Transfer wort to carboy, add nutrient and yeast, stop with airlock
- Sometimes dry-hop, recipe dependent
- After 2-3 weeks (depends on ferementation progress), rack to a bottling bucket, add priming sugar (I use honey despite all advice I've read to the contrary), transfer to bottles
- Bottle-condition N weeks (where N varies from "I can't resist sampling after 4-5 days" to "It's really best when you wait 2-4 weeks")
If any of that sounds really super alien to you, you might want to do some general reading up on getting started with extract brewing. But that's basically the process.
As for specific recipes, I love the hopville.com site's "Beer Calculus" recipe formulator. They've got a good database with all the stuff I work with pretty well represented. The original gravity readings usually are dead-on with what I measure, and final gravities will be off depending on how much of my recipe uses honey, since ale yeasts really seem to go to town on honey and ferment out much drier than expected - you can play with this by customizing the attenuation percentage on the yeast, but it's a guessing game and I don't have hard math behind that part yet.
Here are some of the recipes I've used:
My first all-honey hoppy hydromel/metheglin thing
A new take on that with all noble hops instead of American IPA-style hops - I just bottled this Saturday and haven't tasted it yet
Pilsner-like ale made with rice syrup and honey - this is the best thing I've brewed, period. Golden yumminess, and a good match in color and texture for a pilsner
Blackstrap stout - this is an experiment, just about ready to get bottled. I got excited after reading that folks like George Washington used to brew with molasses. I probably overdid it.
An attempt at a Gluten-free clone of Sierrra Nevada's Celebration Ale - just bottled Saturday, haven't tried it yet.
Most recently I finally decided to try a brew with sorghum, since I wanted to brew a GF clone of a crazy strong IPA called Pliny The Elder and figured it would be a good time to try it. That's just in the fermenter now.
Hope this helps! I'm no brewing genius yet, but I've been having a blast. I still drink normal barley beer when I'm out, but I enjoy the GF brews I make for myself and my gluten-sensitive wife a lot more, partly just 'cause I made them, and partly because they give me all the pleasure of drinking ale without the heavy gut feel I get from the "real" stuff.
Jeff