I recently began building a home bar - the liquids, that is, not the horizontal surface - from scratch. I've been picking up a bottle or two a week for a few months and sampling most of them on arrival. Some of these are fairly expensive - particularly the brown 'sipping' spirits. It has occurred to me that if I continue accumulating at the current rate, and if I continue opening to taste-test as I go, I will wind up with bottles which may remain unfinished for several years. This is because, in the interests of variety, I'm buying much faster than I (and any guests of sufficiently sophisticated tastes) will consume. This got me researching shelf-life, and on F. Paul Pacult's 'Spirit Journal' site I noticed the following remark: Wow. A month? Even if two or three months are 'safe', I probably don't want to have more than one or two really good bottles open at a time, and that rather screws up the possibility of offering visitors / myself an interesting choice. And then there's all the non-sipping stuff which may be sitting open after making various cocktails. So, I'm wondering what the experiences of others here are. Is Mr Pacult overly pessimistic or cautious? Does it vary for different spirit (sub-)categories? Obviously, you can take it as read that all bottles are carefully resealed, in the dark, and away from direct heat. In an ideal world I'd do this the scientific way using a batch of bottles bought at the same time, but one Ardbeg Uigeadail is quite expensive enough. Especially since the experiment is premised on the possibility of ruining most of it... I did search the forums, and found only one short discussion on this. Most of that related to literally open bottles (rather than opened bottles). But feel free to flame me if this FAQ #1 and I'm missing the obvious. By the way, first post. Thanks all for the great resource which I've been dipping into for quite a while.