Thank you, gentlemen, for your considered replies. I shall throw caution to the wind and use the 27-month-old LME in my Amber. It may still be good, or not. I believe the sugar that was in the malt in January 2021 is still there, and that the little yeasties will still eat it. The final color of the final product is of minimal interest to me. The final alcohol concentration of the bottled product is of minimal interest to me. I drink beer for the bitterness; i.e. the flavor of the hops coming through. I like hoppy IPAs with IBU ratings up in the 60s, 70s and 80s.
If the LME is a bust, at least where it has been taking-up space in my icebox will be open for a fresher seven pounds of LME. I have no idea at this moment what will be the designation of that LME. I don't care for beer so translucent that it's bordering on transparent. In short, I don't drink Bud Light nor Corona Extra.
Something that troubled me those twenty years ago when I hung-up homebrewing was how to separate the hop sludge from the boiled wort. I never used a muslin hop sack; don't even know if they existed around 2002 and 2001. I have a 300-micron hop spider that seems to work pretty well but still, I want my wort even more free of hop trash. I came-up with the idea of straining the wort through a piece of 110-micron nylon cloth, suitably sanitized before the wort gets poured through it. At its size of just one-third the hop spider, I believe I'll get a really clean volume in the fermentation bucket. I have a piece of the cloth one meter wide by two meters long. My plan is to use an elastic cord around the top of the bucket and to slowly pour the cooled wort as we pour a beer we're going to shortly drink, so as to avoid the hop sludge from coming-on too fast and having it clog the tiny weave of the cloth. With such a tight weave, we also have to be aware that the surface tension of the wort might disallow a free and fast pouring. I think I'll do the transfer from kettle to bucket in my bathtub so as to contain anything that fails to pass through the nylon cloth.
An idea that came to me several days ago concerns the yeast bed on the bottom of the fermentation bucket. We all know the genius behind the conical fermenter--collects the yeast sludge at the bottom and below the spigot. I thought if I was to raise my bucket maybe three-quarters of an inch directly under the spigot, the yeast would settle to be thin at that point, and thicker at 180-degrees across the bucket. The top surface of the dead yeast is going to be perfectly flat because that's how gravity works. I'm sure someone, somewhere over the past 5000 years of beermaking has thought of this. I just put this here to tacitly say "I'm green, but not entirely a newbie at this."
I'm a truck driver at FedEx Ground not too far from Reno. My work schedule keeps me away from doing the things I'd like to do if I had more off-duty time. I have no wife nor kids, so "family and homelife problems" are not a concern. I'd just like to have a solid schedule for when I work and when I'm off. This info doesn't much apply to this discussion; I just include it if I'm given advice by the membership to do X, Y or Z at a certain number of days along the way and can't because I won't be home that day to take that next step. It's been that way since I started driving in January 1994. Fourteen more months and I can retire.
Things to do, today. Back at it tomorrow...