How did you start in brewing?
My father-in-law was homebrewing and I got into it, too.
I bought kits from a local brew supply store, with good results almost every time.
My grandfather influenced me in making wine. My mother taught me in making fruit juice. Good idea combination I was encouraged to make my own. I bought books and magazines about homebrewing. And that I started brewing.
Last year I read stephen harold buhner's Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers: The Secrets of Ancient Fermentation and that was it! I was hooked. I mostly do mead style brewing by myself but I have done beers with a friend, and soon i will try on my own. I really like using different herbs to give intersting flavors and different sorts of "buzzes."
Come to think of it, my mother used to make dandelion and various fruit wines, too.
I sampled those, but technically I was a little young to be getting involved at that point.
I began home brewing around 1990 while I was attending college. My first attempts were simple extract brews using nothing more than malt extract, sugar, and dry yeast. My first batch had a very strong alcohol taste and I was very disappointed with the results. After several batches, this eventually led to me giving up the hobby for other pursuits.
Around the year 2001, I began brewing again with a simple kit my wife purchased for me from a homebrew store in Boston via the Internet. After a couple of extract brews that had very passable results, I began to yearn for more information regarding the hobby. I studied many books and decided that my next option would be to delve into all-grain home brewing. I began by using a simple three bucket system that was entirely gravity fed. I learned much more about the process and developed a desire to gain more control over different aspects of the mashing, lautering, and sparging steps of all-grain brewing.
After much deliberation, I began to research many of the aspects of brew system construction including valves, pumping options, hoses, electricity versus propane, etc... I found many great resources on the Internet consisting of personal web pages, newsgroups, and bulletin boards.
I also had quite a bit of help deciding what would work best for my system as far as stand materials are concerned. I decided to try rigid copper tubing since I had not seen any one else use this material. It ended up being more than strong enough and it has been working great for the last 5 years.
I also gleaned much information from major brewing publications available at the local brew store including a fantastic article regarding pumps in Brew Your Own. I studied several types of recirculating mash systems and felt that the Heat Exchange Recirculating Mash System (HERMS) style best suited my needs and what I wanted to accomplish from the styles of beer that I wished to produce. This is not to say that other systems wouldn't have yielded just as satisfactory results but I felt the HERMS system might be easier for me to construct and would minimize wort scorching. These factors led to the development of my current semi-automated system.
At the present time, I am hopelessly addicted to homebrewing.....
My wife bought me a kit for my 40th birthday 8 years ago.
i went to visit a buddy of mine in denver and he brought me along on a trip to the homebrew store. i was intrigued and bought "The Complete Joy of Homebrewing". i read it and then bought a kid via the infernet.
My buddy Dave got me into homebrewing, and I still brew with him to this day!
I have yet to get him onto this forum, though...have to work on that 
I decided right off the bat to buy a keg system, and I am sooo glad I did...when I bottle with Dave it gets so monotonous that I am almost tempted to buy him a kegging system too!
I'll be bottling this weekend with the in-laws in town - I don't know how that's going to go. I figure since the entire experience is going to be new to me I'll probably enjoy it, but I can imagine that it gets monotonous after a while...
This sort of happened accidentally for me. A friend received a homebrewing kit as a birthday gift and never used it. Then, she was moving away and was getting rid of stuff. She knew I loved beer, so she handed me the kit (essentially for free) and I've been hooked since.