arguments to a block view

Hi. I've been trying to get an argument passed onto a block (though at this point I would be happy just passing an argument). I am using php to decompose a clean url, putting it into an array and then using a conditional to determine and set the argument. A little background on the site, I want to have a list of beers and who brews them. On a brewer's page I want all of the beers brewed by that company in a block on the page. So I want to do the argument from (field_beers_brewer), my fields in the view are node titles and field_beer_brewers and I am filtering just the custom content type "beers". From what I have learned so far I believe this is the correct approach. Here is the code.

$path = drupal_get_path_alias($_GET['q']); 
$path = explode('/', $path);
if ($path[0] ==  'brewer' )
{
return $path[1];
}

when in the page I am getting no useful output. using the preview section on the views I am seeing some odd happenings. I enter in the arguments "brewer/guiness" I feel that this code should return the argument "guiness" however this is the query generated.

SELECT node.nid AS nid,
   node.title AS node_title,
   node_data_field_beer_brewer.field_beer_brewer_value AS node_data_field_beer_brewer_field_beer_brewer_value,
   node_data_field_beer_brewer.nid AS node_data_field_beer_brewer_nid,
   node.type AS node_type
 FROM node node 
 LEFT JOIN content_type_beer node_data_field_beer_brewer ON node.vid = node_data_field_beer_brewer.vid
 WHERE (node.type in ('beer')) AND (node_data_field_beer_brewer.field_beer_brewer_value = 'brewer')

the last line I see it is trying to search for the first argument. Also if i use %1 in the title, I get "brewer" if I used %2 I expect to get "guiness" but I just get "%2", anything hear glaringly obvious here that I'm doing wrong?