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In short, no. Any LME you end up with will be super-dark. Dry malt extract requires flash drying with high pressure nozzles and is not a home operation. Briess has some explanation of the process. The technical nature of creating DME and LME is more than can be done in the home. It's even harder to do than malting your own grains, which is difficult ...

Its free stuff. Try it and see what happens. Getting and using some fresh hops and yeast would be a good idea. LME tends to get darker with age and some of the flavors get less intense, but it doesn't really go bad. As long as we are talking about canned LME and not stuff in a plastic container, it will make beer.

Hops add bittering via isomerization. When you add the hops to the boil, the alpha acids are extracted, and eventually isomerize and provide bitter flavors. This happens with or without sugars. Ray Daniels's book Designing Great Beers has lots of useful formulae and equations, including how to calculate IBU. Basically it looks like this: IBU = Woz * U% ...

I would think that storing it sealed and frozen would be the best way to keep it fresh. As long as it's under refrigeration, spoilage shouldn't be an issue, but I know volatile aromatics will still escape over time. From BYO: Liquid malt syrup is easy to store as long as it is in the original can. This is an ideal container that keeps the syrup safe ...

Most beer is made from a base malt plus specialty grains. In your case, you're using LME as your base malt instead of whole grains, but the result is largely the same as an all-grain brew. The base malt provides the bulk of the sugar that the yeast eats and the additional malt and grains give it flavor and character. Selecting different malts and grains to ...

You can make a large range of great brews using the same base malt all the time; regardless of extract or all grain brewing. The variety in appearance and flavors style to style is in the specialty grains. When I extract brewed I always bought the same style of DME (light) and did everything else with specialty grains. (I think golden, amber, brown, dark ...