Reviewer: Pickwick (with notes from Tashtego)
Distillery: Worthy Park
Origin: Saint Catherine Parish, Jamaica
Bottle Size: 700 ml
Bottle Count: 246
ABV: 60.8%
Distilled: 2015
Base Material: Molasses
Still: Pot still
Aging specs: Continentally aged 9+ years in a once-used bourbon barrel
Bottled: 2025
Nose: Honey, underripe banana, green pepper, green apple
Palate: Mandarin orange, green mango, banana, honey, fruit cocktail
Finish: Cola, toasted nuts, orange zest
We ended up obtaining this rum after the 2015 WPM was probably our favorite - it was mine, anyway - of the Spinnaker box set. If 2015 WPM is that good with an extra-bourbony finish, surely the original rum (more or less) could only be even better!
One thing this rum definitely has going for it is fruitiness. The characteristic Worthy Park banana note is present right away on the nose, if a little green; there’s also a honey sweetness, and then some more mix of fruit and some vegetal notes as I got both green pepper and green apple. For a nearly ten-year-old rum (granted, entirely aged in Europe), there’s definitely a bit of a green rawness to this one. It still tastes fresh, as opposed to having that depth of a longer-aged rum.
The palate continues to offer a lot of fruit. I got a lot of orange from the Spinnaker bottling, and while this one isn’t quite so orange-heavy I did pick up a note which reminded me of a very specific taste: “mandarin oranges in light syrup.” (I used to eat them out of the can as an after-school snack, 30 years ago or so.) There’s some more vegetal rawness which presents as more like green mango on the palate, but also some sweeter fruits and honey again behind it. Towards the back palate and the finish, the barrel starts to make its presence more known with notes of spice-heavy cola and toasted nuts. Orange zest lingers on the very back end.
Worthy Park is not one of the ester-heavy Jamaican distilleries, and you’d never confuse this with Hampden, but it does have a very distinctive profile all its own: sweet fruits, maybe even a little underripe, as opposed to that overripe fruit hogo you get from many other Jamaican rums. Much like I felt with the Spinnaker, it just feels very tropical and pleasant. (It’s even better if you’ve had something else first; at just shy of 61%, this drinks its proof as the first rum of the night, which gets in the way of enjoying all the fruit a little bit.) I’ll give it a 4 on Taste; there’s a tad too much “green” in there for it to be a 5 for me, but even still, it’s highly enjoyable as a fruit basket of a rum. For Haste, it’s a 3; Worthy Park is getting a bit easier to find, so I don’t know that this requires a special order, but at $100 on the Raising Glasses website or $90 on the shelf if you happen to live near Burlington Wine and Spirits in Massachusetts, it’s good value for what you get and easily worth a pickup at full price.
Taste/Haste Scale: 4 / 3
