Papalin Jamaica 7 Year Old Original Vatted Rum 8001185

Papalin 7 Year Old Velier Original Vatted Rum 2021 / 47%

Located in the Lluidas Vale of Jamaica’s Saint Catherine parish, the Worthy Park Estate is a sprawling 100,000 acres of land, around 40% of which is dedicated to sugar cultivation. Records indicate that rum production commenced there as far back as 1741 and took place there for 220 years before the original distillery was shut down due to an oversupply of Jamaican rum following the second world war. Amazingly, in 340 years the estate has been owned by just three different families, the most recent being the Clarke’s, who bought it in 1918. Gordon, the great-grandson of the first Worth Park Clarke submitted plans for a new state of the art distillery in 2005, which produced its first spirit two years later. It produces pure single rum from its own estate molasses on its sole double-retort pot still from Forsyths in Scotland. The distillery’s first brand was titled Rum Bar, before the casks initially laid down for ageing became Worthy Park’s first official release under their own name when the Estate Reserve was announced at RumFest in 2017.

The Hampden Estate was founded in 1753 by a Scotsman called Archibald Sterling, in the Queen of Spain valley of Jamaica’s Trelawny parish. For 250 years it remained family owned, selling rum to third-party blenders and independent bottlers. Mismanagement however meant that by 2003 it was in financial trouble, with the Jamaican government stepping in to assume ownership and some of its debt in order to preserve the jobs of its employees. They sold it in 2009 to the Hussey family’s Everglades Farms, who as first point of business began laying down the casks that would eventually become the first Hampden Estate labelled official bottling of the distillery’s rum, launched in collaboration with Velier in 2018. Famed for its heavy, ester-driven style, Hampden is joined by Worthy Park as the only two Jamaican distilleries that produce exclusively pure single rums (using only pot stills). It currently has four pot stills: two from Forsyths in Scotland, one from Vendome in Kentucky, and another from T&T Engineering in South Africa.

This Papalin 7 Year Old is a blend of rums from two Jamaican distilleries, Worthy Park and Hampden.

Velier was founded by Casimir Chaix in Genoa in 1947 as a wine and spirits importer and distributor. By the 1980s they were still a small family-company with less than ten staff. This all changed in 1986 when it was purchased by Luca Gargano, a former brand ambassador for Saint James who was at the time still in his twenties. Under his direction, they selected their first single cask whiskies in 1992, and their first rum in 1996. In the decades that followed, Velier have gone on to become one of the most collectible brands in the industry, and Gargano has positioned them as the one of the foremost authorities and bottlers of rum anywhere in the world.