
<<< Smile means I'm not a condecending kind of guy. I just like to inform people so they know more than they knew yesterday.
That said... PREPARE TO BE BEER SCHOOLED!
There's about a light year of space between getting a Mr. Beer and as you say "sourcing" all my materials from scratch. I suppose I could grow my own barley and malt and roast it, collect and propogate airbore yeast from my own backyard, and grow hops up a trelis on the side of my house. Even the most hardcore only go as far as growing hops, and a few more might have experimented with roasting some malt in their oven.
My comparision, Mr. Beer is "take pre-hopped malt extract syrup, mix with water, throw dry yeast packet and viola". It's not complex or customizable, but it's easy. And it still has more creativity than just buying a 6 pack.
I'm about a step and a half ahead of that. I'm using unhopped malt extract, adding store-bought hops, and pitching a liquid yeast starter. My major advancement this time is the kegging.
By this summer, I expect to go "all-grain", which means the only steps in the process done for me are lab yeast, initial malting of barley grain, and packing of pellet hops. I still have to mash it to produce the uncondensed malt extract, or roughly defined as "wort", or "pre-beer".
On a scale between 0 and 10, where 0 is buying a six pack and 10 is good old organic grow-it-all-myself, I'm doing a 3.5, and I hope to get to a 7-8 this summer.