The sweet rewards of procrastination
When we lived in Veneta, I brewed up six one-gallon batches of mead (most of them were more properly melomels). They blew off big time in my brewing cabinet, and I cleaned up the mess a bit, put clean airlocks in all of the bottles, and... didn't exactly forget about them, but ignored them.
Some years later, when we moved back inside the Eugene city limits I took them along, and stashed them in the top shelf of our pantry, thinking, "I'll deal with those soon." That was over a year and a half ago.
Today I was siphoning a couple of five-gallon batches of cyser into carboys to clear, and I decided while I was at it to finally deal with the ancient one-gallon batches.
The necks were filled with crusty residue, the outside covered in sticky dust, and the bottoms were coated in sludge -- in some cases an inch and a half thick. But I sampled them anyway. One batch of cyser and a batch of sweet mead were undrinkable; I'm not knowledgeable enough to be able to diagnose what did them in, but they weren't worth the trouble of doing anything but flushing them down the drain. But the remaining four were pretty darn good.
So I siphoned them into clean jugs, and they're all lovely and clear and delicious.
The first thing that comes to mind is that I should have a series of parties to share around a gallon at a time. It strikes me as being similar to the Victorian mummy unwrapping parties, which is an unpleasantly ghoulish thought... but I guess since I made these mummy meads, and they're not people after all, I can get over my moral disgust.