The Bourbon Drinker’s Guide to Rum
Tired of hunting down rare bottles and seeing prices rise, seasoned whiskey drinkers are turning to the spirit’s elusive cousin. Here’s how you can too.
Rum marketers have long prophesied a great rise in popularity for the category, which has been dominated by the mojito fodder lining liquor store aisles. The pitch: seasoned bourbon drinkers will come to love rum, which is so much more than Bacardi silver. They were right in one sense, but wrong in another. Bourbon whiskey shares much with rum, but its followers won’t flock to rum for similar flavor profiles — they will convert only if given a pressing reason to. And ironically, it’s bourbon’s own swelling popularity that’s provided one.
There are other, perhaps even better, reasons the modern bourbon-whiskey drinker might be tempted by the rum world’s easy-going nature, but the simplest argument is made with numbers: if you could buy Pappy van Winkle for $100 right now, would you? Bourbon whiskey’s popularity has reached the point where many coveted bottles — Pappy, Buffalo Trace’s Antique Collection, older Michter’s and more — are effectively unobtainable; once widely available staples of the top shelf,
Weller 12-year-old, Blanton’s and Eagle Rare (really, you could name the entire Buffalo Trace lineup), in turn, have become the Pappys of the 2020s.
By contrast, rum offers more: more varieties; more flavors; more production methods; more eccentricities; more bottle diversity — and, critically, more availability. Step back and compare the breadth of flavor profiles in the rum world to that of bourbon — or even whiskey, bourbon’s parent category — and rum is the clear winner. This is mostly due to one of rum’s unique traits: decentralization. Where bourbon, scotch and spirits like tequila and cognac are, to different degrees, bound by regulation, geography and strict definitions, rum is a loose cannon. Make it with molasses, and you’ve got rum. Make it with fresh sugarcane, and you still have rum. Age it (or don’t), blend it with spices (or not), filter out the color (or add it) — it’s all rum.
With that in mind, here are the best rums for an ex-bourbon drinker to start with — from the true Pappy of rum to the Bacardi you should be drinking.