Wine is easy to do. The alcohol content is high enough that you don't need to worry about bacteria setting it off and turning it into garbage. If it tastes like ass you just make a bad wine.....that's about it.
If you're careful with your sanitization it's not hard to make decent beer. Bacteria is your enemy though, so if you introduce any you'll get skunky beer. I had that happen to me once, so I'm OCD careful about it. Nothing worse than 3 weeks of work turning into bad beer because you didn't sanitize thoroughly. My beer tastes like any store bought beer you'll find.
I started with Brewhouse kits (premade wort) and it was pretty hard to screw up. They made decent (drinkable) beer that people would drink if I ran out of everything else. I did a lot of reading on them though, and you can "hack" the kits to produce some really, really good beer (award winning, in fact). I did that for a while, and have now switched to all grain. I'm not totally sold on it though.....for $50 I can hack a brewhouse kit and produce something that's better than an all grain beer that I made from scratch, and in half the time.
Anyways, I'd be happy to answer questions on it if anyone is interested. I'm no pro.....just a guy that loves beer and found a way to save a lot of money on it.
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