Home brewing is something I'd really like to get into.
I imagine I'll have a lot of failures though, before I start producing anything decent - can the quantities given be lessened, e.g. quartered, and still get the same taste result?
I imagine I'll have a lot of failures though, before I start producing anything decent - can the quantities given be lessened, e.g. quartered, and still get the same taste result?
I started with "kit and kilo" kits, which are almost impossible to mess up (really just add a can of concentrated pre-hopped wort and a kilo of sugar or dextrose to 5 gallons of water, cool it down and throw yeast in). If you want to just experiment, that's a relatively low cost and simple way to start. It's easy to scale up from there too - to either extract brewing with dried concentrated wort, or even all-grain brewing, where you're working directly with malted barley and other grains.)
A lot of people will suggest starting with all-grain from the start, but I found graduating up to that allowed me to master some of the basics (sanitation, fermentation temps, etc), without having too much to focus on at once.
Recipes are equipment and process dependent, and don't scale in a perfectly linear fashion but those are refinement.
Grab a copy of Papazian's The New Complete Joy of Home Brewing and "relax, don't worry and have a homebrew"
You also have to advantage over microbreweries to be more creative and test out stuff in your recipes because making 5 gallons of not so perfect beer is not the end of the world. All the professional brewers I know were homebrewers before and still are.
The next step after would be taking recipes, either from the kits you already made, or found elsewhere, and assembling the ingredients yourself, tweaking where you want to make a change.