Micko71 said:
Ok. So is dried just 'plain' like plain yoghurt and u add the flavours ? Or could you just add ur sugar as usual and dry hop it to lift it a bit ? Sorry total newb.
Very simply: Beer = malted barley (plus sometimes other sugars), with added water, bittered and flavoured with hops and fermented into an alcoholic beverage with yeast.
Malt sugars originally are extracted from grain (generally barley sometimes wheat and other grains too). When you buy a tin, the extraction has been done and the resulting liquid condensed into a syrup.
Dried malt is similar but all the water has been evaporated out (dehydrated).
Your regular tins of coopers pale, muntons dry stout, tooheys draught, etc have also had bittering hops added so you can simply add water to full volume as well as some extra sugar (malt is a type of sugar so don't just think of plain white sugar). You can also pimp these out with extra hops and other things.
You can also buy unhopped extract - to make beer from these you need to add hops as well as water. The dried stuff mentioned will be unhopped but there are liquid tins, similar to the hopped ones. You need to make sure you know which you have.
Hops fulfil 3 main functions in beer (although there are other effects) - they add bitterness to counteract the sweetness of the malt sugar, they add flavour (think of that citrus/floral character in a little creatures pale) and they add aroma. They also act as a preservative and help head retention. In order to extract bitterness, you need to boil the hops, preferably with some malt. A longer boil, generally speaking, provides more bitterness. Different hop varieties and crops have different bittering potential. A shorter boil may provide some bitterness but will also provide aromatic compounds that make the beer taste and smell a certain way.
Dry hopping by itself will not offer enough bitterness to balance a beer and the type of bitterness contributed is very different to that achieved by boiling.
Until the above is a bit clearer, stick with kits and dry hopping but read as much as you can about grain and extract brewing so you can start to give different things a go.
www.howtobrew.com is a good beginners reference. Not everything is gospel/100% true but it's a good rundown.