We are newbies; we have some knowledge and have brewed beer with friends. But we are definitely newbies.
This needs emphasising. And if you can afford it then as described below you have a good reason to buy once-but-right so why not go the full Monty. At the same time, there's nothing particularly magic about most brewing equipment, mostly it's just heating stuff, pumping liquids etc as has been mentioned with the tamales pots, bending your own copper pipe and so on, you will be able to make beer just from hardware available domestically. I'm told I make good beer and yet I don't own a single item of stainless steel, it's all plastic buckets, copper chiller etc.
A lot of it comes down to knowing yourselves - are you interested in the science of brewing, the engineering, or do you just want to get CHEAP BEER!! Nothing wrong with the latter, and it often leads to one of the former, but what works for one personality won't work for the other. Don't be too taken in by the engineering subgroup on HBT who fetishise all things shiny.
The other thing to emphasise is that although everyone talks about recipes as a standard 19l/5 US gallons there's nothing magic about that figure. I started off making recipes in that size but I found that as someone interested in the science who doesn't actually drink too much, I now make 13l or 17l batches that I split into 3 or 4 batches of just over 4l, with different yeast/hops etc. It makes a lot of sense to buy good stuff between two of you, but will you really be able to find the time to get together? How much beer do you _really_ drink? Do you just want to knock out a basic eg Citra IPA or British bitter in bulk, or smaller amounts of a wider range of beers? And so on.
Everything costs more here. If we bought the "Northern Brewer" cooler setup here in Mexico (Which costs $329 on northernbrewer.com) it would cost us $1520USD plus shipping. Which is crazy. So we are importing everything ourselves.
Ouch - so much for NAFTA/TLCAM.... Have you looked at domestic options? If nothing else it would mean you're paying import taxes on wholesale prices rather than retail.
These places stock White Labs yeast, which points to a certain level of sophistication, the stores in Tijuana in particular may have "cost-effective" options for imports....?
More and more micros are popping up in the country which is great but the beers arent quite there yet and are costly.
Make friends with any local breweries. Not only are they good just to chat to for advice (even if you don't rate their beer!) but one of the biggest problems for people in less-homebrew-friendly countries seems to be malt. It's low-value but bulky & heavy, which means shipping charges can be brutal for single bags and it's particularly helpful to be able to buy it off people who are already buying it by the truckload. And hops and free yeast as well if you're lucky, but grain is the big one.
Since you're not taking the bargain-basement route, a few cheap nice-to-haves :
Autosiphon - less relevant for a big system if you have pumps, but still useful to have around.
Heat resistant silicone gloves - you're moving a lot of hot liquids around.
Spare hydrometer - HBT members have
broken thousands but they're cheap.
Finishing hydrometer - separate from the above, it's nice to have one that only reads to 1.020 for better resolution of your finishing gravity, whether it's stable etc.
Now as a former lab rat, I love a bit of "proper" science gear. But there's nothing particularly magic about conical flasks and in some ways they're a bit of a PITA - they are quite fragile and they kinda imply a stirplate. Personally I take a James Bond approach to starters - shaken not stirred - so use bottles with screw-on caps. OK, I use proper borosilicate bottles, but you can use HDPE milk containers if you have them? Boil up some extract in a pan, cover and cool, then pour into the sterlised container and shake it up really hard, add the yeast then just give it a gentle shake every time you pass it.
Also bear in mind that you ideally want a starter to be 5-10% of the volume of your final beer, so once you start heading up to 80l+ then really you're getting to the stage where it's better to think in terms of using a small beer to grow up your yeast rather than just pouring off 4-8l of starter supernatant.
Whether or not you go that route, a couple of spare plastic buckets are useful for weighing out grain, dumping spent grain into etc.
Also think about grain storage in sealed containers - I guess storage is more of a problem in tropical countries than here.
A reliable thermometer is more than a nice to have - something like a Thermopen.
You need 5+kg scales to measure out grain, but it's also useful to have some small scales that are more accurate to measure out hops and water salts, say 100g or 200g at 0.01g precision.
My inner lab rat does like my proper yeast wrangling kit. I know you can use jamjar lids as Petri dishes and paper clips as innoculation loops, but a 10-pack of glass Petri dishes and a proper loop are not expensive. Also I guess the logistics mean that you'll be looking to reuse yeast as much as you can (you can't use the typical homebrew strains indefinitely, but even 6-8 generations is a useful saving) so reusable McCartney tubes are nice for storing slants on, although you can also use disposable tubes. Or store in microcentrifuge tubes in glycerol in the freezer. You need a flame as well - I use one of those little handheld blowtorches, but you could use a gas stove.
I'm sure there were other things I meant to mention but that's some pointers - good luck.
