Parhelia Spirits Jamaica New Yarmouth Hugh Murdoch

Reviewer: Tashtego (with notes from Pickwick)

Distillery: New Yarmouth
Origin: Clarendon Parish, Jamaica
Bottle Size: 700ml
Bottle Count: 240
ABV: 68.4%
Distilled: July 2019
Base Material: Molasses
Still: Pot
Aging specs: Rested in a stainless steel tank for over a year; casked in first-fill ex-bourbon in December 2020 and aged continentally for over 4 years (2 months shy of 5 years)
Bottled: Not stated; decanted from cask in October 2025

Nose: Banana candy, tropical fruits, solvent, burnt sugar
Palate: Strawberry, tropical fruits, caramel, citrus, orange cake, lemongrass
Finish: Mango, barrel

This is the lower-ester companion bottling to Parhelia Spirits’ New Yarmouth Winston Kennedy offering. While the Winston Kennedy is New Yarmouth’s highest-ester mark, the Hugh Murdoch is their 4th highest with an ester level of 500-700 g/hLPA (comparable to Hampden Estate’s mid-range HLCF mark). Parhelia offers some comprehensive info on this rum on their website, even going so far as to measure the ester levels themselves. Their labwork put this expression right at 552 g/hLPA. That may or may not mean much to you, but precision is always appreciated, particularly by rum nerds.

Compared to the Winston Kennedy bottle, the Hugh Murdoch starts off incredibly powerful on the nose. There’s a lot of solvent you have to get through to find the fruitier notes. There’s some glue and ethyl alcohol that conceal tropical fruits, bananas and sugar. It’s hot on the palate. Let’s just say this one does not drink below its proof. Unlike the WK bottle, this is not full of pineapples or apples. There’s some tropical fruit, but it’s more mango, lemon and strawberry. Here the sugar comes in stronger and you get a variety of fruity desserts. Adding a splash of water, it opens up a bit to reveal more caramel and banana bread with some associated baking spice. The finish is a bit tamer - some mango, and you get some of the age from the barrel.

There’s a lot of esters here that you don’t get with Hampden - they are crispy, as Pickwick says, but also tart and spicy and playful on the tongue. It’s unmistakably Jamaican and feels spiritually similar to the other New Yarmouths we’ve tried from Bedford Park. It may not be as recognizable a profile as Hampden Estate, but New Yarmouth is a distillery worth building into your collection for its unique approach to esters alone. It’s a shame we know hardly anything about the distillery!

For Taste, this clocks in at a 4. Probably a softer 4 than the Winston Kennedy, but it’s in the same ballpark. For Haste, it’s a 3. If you’re curious about New Yarmouth, go and pick this up. If you have other expressions from them? Well, you may not need a mid-ester range bottle from them. There’s also the issue of obtaining this bottle (and anything from Parhelia). While this bottle at $110 is perfectly reasonable, we had to place an order minimum of $300 on Cellar.com to have it shipped (plus we had to pay tax, which isn’t always the case online). Since we bought three Parhelia bottles (and split them between us), we cleared the delivery threshold, but obviously not everyone has $300+ to drop on one booze shipment.

Taste/Haste Scale: 4 / 3