New to the trade

First stop on the Internet should be:

Kits are pretty easy to find on the Internet. I would suggest looking for a local home brew shop (LHBS) first and go there, check their kits, etc. If they are helpful, friendly, and seem to know what they are talking about, then it is definitely worth the slightly higher prices they'll probably have. There are lots of on-line homebrew shops, you might start with:

Derric

Try

They are located in Minneapolis.

That's where I get my stuff when I don't go to my LHBS. Michael Herrenbruck DragonTail Ale Drunken Bee Mead

Billl George wrote:

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You might also want to check out

A good beer kit is a kit that doesn't require the addition of sugar.

There's a huge amount of beer kits on the market that tell you to add 1 kg (2,2 lb) of sugar, and this is something you definitely shouldn't do. The sugar will give no taste whatsoever to the final beer, just alcohol. So if you buy a kit that tells you to add sugar, don't add sugar, add DME (dried malt extract a.k.a. spraymalt) or LME (liquid malt extract). Changing the amount of malt extract will naturally affect the strength of the final beer.

John Palmer's "How To Brew" that Derric already suggested for reading is a good book. However there's one thing you should remember after reading it: boiling a beer kit that doesn't tell you to do so is not a good idea. Go see the Annapolis Home Brew site mentioned above, and from there see one of the

links to no-boil beer kits.

Probably the single most sold beer kits in the world are the Australian

Cooper's beer kits. There's also a reason to this: they're good. You can also get them from just about anywhere in the world.

Another brand of kits that I've heard only good things about is the British Woodfordes. Whereas the Coopers kits require additional malt, these kits only require the addition of water.

I bottled a Woodfordes Nelson's Revenge a week ago, so I haven't been able to taste it yet. I've got to wait another week.... :(

So with my limited experience, this is what I'd suggest for a very easy first batch: Cooper's beer kit with added malt extract. Brew it like it says in the instructions with a couple of exceptions: re-hydrate and proof the yeast instead of just sprinkling it over the wort (the How to Brew website has instructions on how to do this), let the beer ferment for two weeks instead of just one before bottling.

EDIT: If you'd like to give a little hint about where you live, then someone who lives in the same area (or even continent) might be able to give you a few good tips on where to get your brewing supplies. If you live in Europe you don't want to order anything from the sites that have been mentioned so far, since they're all in the USA.