Everybody who cares seriously about beer needs to make his own a few times. I learned more about beer from doing that than anything else. Once you've made it yourself -- once you've enjoyed the magnificent feeling of craftsmanship that you can only get from being just absolutely fscked up on beer that you made with your own hands -- then beer stops being just a product that you get out of a bottle, and it really becomes a living, breathing thing. It changes your whole attitude towards drinking it.
I spent about two years seriously brewing. My first few batches, like everybody's, were pretty mediocre. My friends came over, had a bottle, and told me it was good. "Do you want another one?" "Eh, I don't know. What else do you have?" So I kept at it -- I went to liquid yeasts, all-glass fermentation. I knew that I had arrived when I was getting pissed off at my friends for drinking too much of my beer. And that's when I decided that division of labor is a good thing -- I could spent an enormous amount of time and effort, and come out of it with 50 bottles of delicious beer.....or I could go down to the liquor store and buy six glorious bottles of beer for seven bucks. I will probably brew again sometime, but only after I get the space to make 20-gallon batches instead of 5-gallon. I think it would be worth my time if I scaled it up like that.
But really, I can't emphasize how much you learn about appreciating beer by doing it a few times. Once you've made it yourself, it really changes the way you approach every bottle of beer you drink.