I guess it may just end up being hit and miss at first. I went through this with kombucha almost a year ago and am still brewing :-) mostly sencha and bancha green teas with organic rapadura sugar.
I think I will go with the fermented vegetables first. I lived with some refugees from Viet Nam in the mid 70's and they brewed 5 gallon buckets of kim chi under the kitchen sink. We ate it till it came out of our ears.
It seemed pretty easy to me "sit it and forget it"; oh! wrong commercial :-) I will most likely use gallon glass jars though.