Visited a buddy of mine this weekend. He and his roommates (primarily his roommate) made a batch of cask ale.

It was better than the local brewery which specializes in cask.

Talking with his roommate has inspired me to pursue home brewing myself.

Plan to start with a simple mead.

For now I'm trying to find a starter kit with the necessary buckets/jugs, vents, etc.

UPDATE
Went to a home brew, and I currently have 2 gallons of a blueberry peach mead in a primary fermenter. Tomorrow I will be transferring to 2- 1gallon carboys for secondary fermentation for about a month.
But now my 2 gallon fermenting bucket will be open.
I'm thinking I'm ready to give beer a try.
1st Q; should I only make 1 gallon to leave room in the 2 gallon bucket for foaming? Or should I just buy a 5 gallon carboy like I see most people online using?
2nd Q; recommend me an easy, decent ingredients kit. I typically like darker beers, with only a little bit of bitterness. EPAs are good. I think my favorite would be Brown Ales. Any recommendations?

If you don't have a brewing supply store local, Amazon has a homebrew subsection.

If you're interested in mead, look up the recipe for joe's ancient orange mead.  Doesn't get much simpler than that.  All the ingredients can be purchased from the grocery store.  I just bottled my first batch and it turned out great.  For supplies, I buy from a local shop, their website is homebrewing.org but I've only ever dealt with them in person.  To start with, all I needed was a glass carboy with airlock, and some sanitizing solution.

Thanks for the tips guys.
There's a store near where I work. Gonna stop in one day after work.

Hell , I didn’t even know there was cask beer , I must be living under a rock . This is the year of Saison and triple for me , maybe next year I can do year of the cask . I bet the whole thing will fit in my fermentor .

One can simulate cask aging with bourbon soaked oak chips.

This, BUT......JAOM in my experience requires a very long aging process to get really good.  I've done a few batches, and 1 turned out incredible after about 6 months aging.  The others turned out between yuck and decent.

The problem I see with JAOM and a new brewer is you want to jump in and try what you made right away.  A simple beer recipe is a lot quicker turn around.  JAOM is likely to still taste like rocket fuel a month after you pitch yeast.

I think you mean barrel aged, cask ales is a way of serving. True cask ales are kinda rare in the US. It takes a lot of knowledge and skill to do it right.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cask_ale
http://www.camra.org.uk/

what he said. Used to go to a place in Richmond that served Storm King Imperial Stout on cask.... it was amazing.

No, not cask aged, legitimate cask ale.

My friends dad is British so they got hooked on while over there. They even bought a hand pump from a closed British Pub.

Pretty legit.

Hightest's Mead Calculator

Back when I was brewing strong 2003-2008 we had a guy, Hightest on our forum(s) who focused on mead and was a brilliant brewer. He long ago left the on-line forum world but had a web sight up and an online .xls spreadsheet. Someone archived tbe spreadsheet to google docs so it survives today the web site is gone.

Wow, that's pretty cool.