The best part of being a whiskey person is having whiskey friends. And few whiskey friends could ever match my buddy Peter. An avid collector of Ardbeg and numerous other single malts, the size of his collection was only exceeded by the size of his heart. You could ask Peter to open any bottle and he would, and he’d pour—or rather, let you pour—generously.

Over the years, Peter invited me to his home, which he called “Dram Central Station,” to try legendary whiskies I’d never be able to find. I tasted along when he judged blind samples for the Malt Maniacs Awards. We ate cheese and salad and gribenes and poured whiskey after whiskey, as jazz flowed from the speakers and his loony-sweet French bulldogs yapped and pawed at our legs.

A few years ago, Peter died, suddenly. Friends and family members quickly arranged a funeral, emptied out his cluttered house, found homes for the dogs. The epic whiskey collection was destined for auction. Or at least the unopened bottles were.

Because of his bottomless generosity, Peter left behind hundreds of open whiskies. His closest whiskey friend, and one of mine, Josh, swooped in to pack them up and take them home before they were thrown out. Josh’s goal: to taste through them all and find the ones that were still good in time for Peter’s memorial service, when they’d be shared freely among those who loved him.

This was no small task. (I reiterate: hundreds of bottles. And every single one had to be tasted.) That’s the flip side of generosity. If you open a bottle and don’t finish it within a few years, you risk the whiskey becoming undrinkable.

Wine drinkers don’t have this problem. No one opens a bottle of wine, drinks half a glass, and then recorks it and sticks it back in the cellar. Yes, you can monkey around with Coravins and such, but generally speaking, an open bottle of wine has a clear expiration date.

Not so with whiskey. Properly sealed, a bottle of whiskey can theoretically last, unchanged, for decades—maybe even centuries. And once open, whiskey’s high alcohol strength and absence of biological material, like yeast, keep the remaining contents of a bottle fairly stable. At least for a while. But when oxygen gets in, over time, it degrades and damages the whiskey, creating a distinctive mothball flavor that makes you want to scrape your tongue.

The trouble is that, unlike with wine, the timeline for whiskey’s decline isn’t clear. Some of Peter’s open whiskies had sat for a decade or more and tasted just fine. Others were pure naphthalene. Many fell somewhere in the middle. There was no way to predict which one would be heavenly and which was a drain pour.

I helped Josh with some of the tasting, sampling through a heartbreaking parade of beautiful, tragic whiskies. We got excited to try this early-revival Bruichladdich or that independently bottled Glen Garioch, and then shook our heads in sadness as the familiar scent of spoilage wafted up from the glass.

With every pour, I thought of Peter. He had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on his collection. He’d enjoyed much of it, of course, and so had his many friends. But even when he was alive, I’d go over and pick out some old Glen Grants to try, only to find they were past the point of no return. Peter wouldn’t be fazed when this happened, although he was often disappointed. He’d just tell me to go back and pick some more.

A common exhortation to whiskey collectors is: open your bottles! Whiskey is made to be drunk. Peter got that. But in his memory, I’d like to extend that appeal to urge you to finish your bottles, too. Don’t leave your friends and heirs to sift through a collection you built in love, but never got to properly enjoy.

I’m as guilty as anyone of not finishing my bottles. Sometimes I’m not jazzed about a whiskey and decide to leave it be for a while, thinking that a revisit down the road might find me more receptive to its charms. Other times I’ve loved a whiskey so much, or it’s so special and rare, that I can’t bear the thought of finishing it. Sometimes I simply forget that the bottle is there—a danger of owning a lot of whiskey.

I’m making a resolution to do better. And I have some ideas to try. If you share my problem, maybe give them a shot too.

Give It Away

Thanks to the number of tastings I do as part of my work, I pass on lots of whiskey to my friends, family, and plumbers who spot my collection and start telling me excitedly about their favorite pour. And the bottles are always open, since I try everything.

But I’m going to step it up with the closet-cleaning approach. Much like getting rid of clothes that haven’t been worn in a year or two, I’m going to start giving away whiskies I haven’t drunk recently. If that bottle hasn’t been opened since before the pandemic, am I ever really going to be “in the mood” for it again?

Drink It Down

The main culprit for whiskey going bad over time is oxygen. The more there is in a bottle, the shorter the liquid’s lifespan. Peter tried to circumvent this by using various special stoppers that were meant to eliminate oxygen intake, but they pretty much all failed spectacularly. Many of the bottles that were spoiled actually had only a few pours missing. If he’d used the regular cork, they might have lasted much longer.

I vow not to fall prey to trying to preserve the whiskey overlong, though. Once my bottles get to half-full, I’m going to treat them as time bombs. Six months to finish them. Otherwise, out they go!

Decant a Dram

I like to hold on to some whiskies for posterity: as an archive sample, something I can go back to years from now to compare with a future iteration. But there’s no reason to keep a whole bottle for this purpose. Instead I decant a few ounces into a sample-size bottle, label it, and box it up. This is also a way to avoid finishing a special bottle: save the last pour indefinitely in a format that’s both tidy and mostly oxygen-free.

Start a Solera

Many of us have an infinity bottle to dump our dregs into, but that won’t cut it if you have more than a few ounces of excess whiskey. So think bigger. How about an infinity barrel? TikTok user @hyewestsaloon keeps a cask in his bar specifically for dumping unfinished bottles. When friends come over, they add more and pull out their own completely unique pour using a whiskey thief.

Is this the perfect solution? It just might be.