Enhancing A Tinned Beer Kit Experiment

I consider myself in the home brewing world as an extract brewer. I mainly mash crystal malt with speciality grains and use dried spray malt and hops for the boils.  This method suits me down to the ground. I get a much higher quality of beer than the kits, and the variety of recipes to choose from is far and wide. However, I do occasionally brew kits, and there is no reason why the final product has to be of bad quality. So this brings me to my next experiment.

The ingredients I have used are as follows:

1 very cheap tinned beer kit (1.5kg Wilkinson's own brand Hoppy Coppy Bitter)
1 Muntons Beer Kit Enhancer (1kg made up of 500g inverted sugar and 500g light spray malt (This could be substituted with 500g spray malt and 500g sugar, but I had the ready made enhancer kit knocking about in the kitchen)).
20g of USA warrior bittering hops 17% aa

First step, I split the Muntons Beer Enhancer Kit in half.

Get the stove on and add 6 litres of water to the pan.

Fully dissolve half the beer enhancer kit and bring to the boil.

Once it starts the rolling boil, add the hop pellets and maintain the boil for a full 60 minutes.

Now, while the boil is going on the stove, sterilise and rinse the fermenter bin and a long spoon.

Add the contents of the tinned beer kit, and the other half of the beer enhancer kit.

Use some hot water from the kettle to rinse out the contents of the can.

Add some more water to the fermenter to mix everything up together.

Once the boil is complete, empty the contents of the brew kettle into the fermenter. You can strain out the remains of the hop pellets by pouring through a kitchen strainer but I didn't bother such a small amount of hops won't make too much difference in the bottom of the fermenter. It will settle out during the brewing process.

Once the temperature is good to brew, pitch yeast and proceed as with any other beer.

UPDATE.... 

With just over a week in the keg,  I have pulled the first test pint. What a fantastic brew! 

Pale colour,  nice body,  bitter zingy hop flavour. Lovely.  Much better than the thin light flavoured beer that would have been made by following the instructions... 

CONCLUSION

You can vastly improve a beer kit with some knowledge and thought.  Spray malt will greatly affect the body,  and boiling this with hops will give a professional bitterness and flavour.  The overall cost of doing this is very small indeed.  Even the hardened extract brewers like myself  should not be ashamed to carry a couple of cheaper kits for emergencies.  They are easily  enhanced to commercial quality beer with little effort.