Fasty73,
sounds like you had the pleasure of meeting our trolls on your first go!!
Sorry about your experience on AHB so far.
After playing around with homebrewing for a while now and spending more time on this forum than I should, I have learned that whatever you ask on here there is a chance of someone giving you that kind of clever feedback.
I ask about how to filter beer, and I get five replies about why anyone would want to filter beer (plus lots of really good ones).
I ask about how to make low-alcohol beer, I get 15 replies saying I should drink fewer full-strengths rather than worry about brewing low-alc beer..
You may want to just ignore the replies that are off topic or not replying to what you are asking.
(then it's much less fun being a troll, when no one gets annoyed)
All of us (if honest) probably started with an idea of making the kind of beer we used to enjoy drinking at the pub..
Sometimes we forget that it's only when starting to really taste the beers for this and that ingredients, hops, etc we started "branching out" and wanting to add some grains, some more hops, move to extract, then all grain.
And before you know it, we think Toohey's New/Carlton/VB is crap and don't seem to remember we used to like it
There are lots of great advice on here, do what works for you and if you are sucked in like so many others of us, then read some of the articles Manticle linked to, or read through the free version of "How to Brew" online, like most of us started with. (it's a good book!)
http://www.howtobrew.com/
(the link doesn't work right now as the domain is not renewed. let's hope it is sorted within a couple of days, try it again then).
A little bit of reading will give you some background info on why the instructions says to do things in a certain way.
This turned out to be a long post, sorry about that!
Just thought to myself "here we go again" when I saw your post, knowing what kind of answers you would get.
And wanted to let you know that this forum is a great resource, you just need to take some of the bad with the good.
thanks
Bjorn