Worthy Park 16 Year B&B Single Barrel Rum

If you've been drinking rum for any length of time, or have had to suffer through us waxing on and on about rum while shopping with us, you are certainly familiar with the words Jamaican Pot Still Rum being thrown around. It's a hot topic in the rum world, perhaps even a kind of signifier of being in whatever ignominious club us scallywags are admittedly a part of. This style of rum, the kind of ancestral rum of Jamaica that in recent years has become beloved again for its robust intensity of flavor, is synonymous for many with the term "funky" - a term thrown around as a shorthand for intensely fruity, pungent, earthy, nutty flavors. The thing is though - not all Jamaican pot still rum is really all that funky, and in fact some of the best examples of the style don't really exemplify any of the main hallmarks of funk. Enter Worthy Park, which often gets overshadowed by other, funkier producers like Hampden Estate or Long Pond because of the more subtle approach to pot still rum they take. The profile is always decidedly Jamaican, but you may not immediately smell it from across a room upon popping the cork. To make an imperfect analogy to Scotch, if Hampden Estate is a big Islay peat monster like Laphroaig, Ardbeg, or Lagavulin, Worthy Park is Springbank or Highland Park - still a spirit with plenty of character, but with all of the elements in a more subtle and harmonious balance.