I'd second a lot of the advice here...
Beer: start with a kit which contains the cans of malt extract - then you'll get an idea of the process. Once you've got that nailed, invest in a mash-tun and a boiler, and you can mash your own malts (to produce for yourself what is in the cans in a kit). This is often called all-grain brewing (AG). you need to soak the malted grains in hot water (temperature determines how much sugar comes out, amongst other things), and then after a 2-3 hours, you can run off the resulting sugary liquer, and rinse the malted grains through (Sparging).
It's all very possible, but it does need an investment of kit (less than £100).
Wine: I'm now an advocate of starting with something like apple wine - it's not too tricky to make a really drinkable white-wine, and it's easy then to balance the dry/sweet to your taste. If you try and make several versions of 1 wine, then you'll get an idea of the variables. We used the following this year as a bit of an experiment:
1 Gallon Dry white apple wine: 90% brambley apples (juiced), 10% eating aples (juiced), 2lb of sugar.
1 Gallon Sweet white apple wine: Same apple ratios as above, but 2.5lb of sugar.
I was very impressed with the dry this year... I don't know if it was down to increasing the amount of cooking apples, or just a fluke, but it was grand! We could happily drink that instead of shop-bough white.