Worthy Park 502 151 (Velier) Versus Hampden Estate DOK (FineDrams) double review

Crank up the Agharta (   • Miles Davis / Agharta 1  ) and get ready to watch me get rendered a gibbering, incoherent, emotional mess by a pair of the hugest, densest, maddest spirits that I've ever experienced. Stats: Forsyths WP 151 Proof Single Jamaican Rum (Worthy Park bottled by Habitation Velier, approx. 2015; 502 g/Laa of congeners; 3 months' fermentation; 75.5% ABV), 89/100 DOK (Hampden Estate bottled for Aficionados/FineDrams; 1489 g/Laa congeners; 69% ABV), 92/100 Thanks to u/stormstatic for the DOK sample (which was only available on the Fine Drams site and is now gone, although I think we'll be seeing more versions of this stuff). It's the ester numbers and the marques (https://cocktailwonk.com/rum-marques) that begin to tell the tale on these unaged rums. If you think of a theoretical scale of funkiness running from Tigermilk (   • The State That I Am In - Belle & Sebastian  , no funk detectable by science) up to Dark Magus (   • Miles Davis / Dark Magus 1  , funk so aggressive as to be toxic to humans), the WP 151 Proof - that's the even-stronger version of the venerable WP 502 - lands pretty damn high, kind of in Cosmic Slop (   • FUNKADELIC - Cosmic Slop (1973)  ) territory. It's hugely impressive but also hugely classy as well, so maybe throw Keith Jarrett on Bösendorfer into your Funkadelic set. I liked Worthy Park's standard Rum Bar a lot (   • Worthy Park Rum Bar White Overproof Rum re...  ) and this is better still. In almost any other company it would be running away with this video. But then there's DOK, which is the r/rum subreddit's bottling of the highest-ester marque that Hampden Estate can legally produce (see   / rrum_xxx_series_single_cask_rum_update  . This features all the tricks in the Jamaican pot still arsenal (see https://cocktailwonk.com/2020/06/jama...) and runs right up to the dangerous end of that Tigermilk-Dark Magus scale. Richard Seale of Foursquare thinks it's absurd for folks to be imbibing this kind of stuff, at least on its own and not as part of a blend (https://cocktailwonk.com/2018/05/are-..., and he's not going to be lacking for allies. But if it's undrinkable on paper, yet one may still ask: how does it actually behave in a glass? I had been expecting just a crazier version of Hampden's already-crazy Rum Fire (   • Hampden Estate Rum Fire White Overproof Ru...  , which I use as a point of reference throughout this video). But it's not, not really. Instead it's utterly otherworldly, cerebral and condensed, as if the funk had collapsed in upon itself like a dying star. You can actually witness my tasting notes go off into madness while I try to follow this thing. If you want to know what it must have been like to be drinking Bowmore forty-odd years ago, when vodka was the big sexy and Islay malts were regarded as too strong to be anything but a blend or cocktail component, I'd say grab a bottle of DOK: it's an enormous challenge for the drinker and, I think, a future classic in the making. It's also the best thing I've tasted in a very long time.