Vinepair: The 30 Best Rums for 2025

Rum continues to win hearts and fill jiggers and glasses by virtue of being one of the world’s most versatile and diverse spirits. Distilled from sugar cane juice, molasses, and other derivatives, it is crafted in column and pot stills, and matured in climates ranging from the humid Caribbean to cooler, continental warehouses. The result is a category that stretches from grassy agricoles and funky, high-ester bottlings to ultra-aged expressions that rival any whiskey.

That breadth is just as evident at the bar: Rum is vital to classics like the Daiquiri, Mojito, and Mai Tai, and central to modern creations like the Kingston Negroni. Of course, there are dedicated, top-shelf sippers, as well as spiced shooters, which accounted for more than half of the rum sold in the U.S. last year.

With all due respect to the latter style, we did not consider flavored selections for our annual rum roundup. Instead, we focused on the diverse range of examples outlined above, tasting roughly 100 bottles from almost two dozen nations to compile this list of the 30 best rums to drink right now.

The 30 Best Rums to Drink in 2025

The Best Rum for Cocktails

Transcontinental Rum Line High Seas

As the old line goes, “what one rum can’t do, three rums can,” and that’s exactly the proposition with this blend of Panamanian, Jamaican, and Martinique distillates. Bottled at 45 percent ABV, High Seas delivers savory, vegetal, and lightly sweet notes, alongside bursts of tropical fruit, spice, and coffee. Expressive but never overwhelming, it offers plenty of personality without threatening to steal the show — making it equally at home in a Daiquiri, Mai Tai, or more modern creations. At $35 per bottle, it’s a top-tier option that’ll basically run you the same amount as two drinks at a bar.

Average price: $35
Rating: 93

The Best Rums Under $100

The Spirit of Haiti Clairin Vaval

Bottled at a precise 53.5 percent ABV, this Clairin is produced by Distillerie Arawaks — owned and operated by Fritz Vaval, whose family has been in the farm distillery business for close to 80 years. Fermented using ambient yeasts and distilled on a proprietary still, the nose juxtaposes papaya and mango with salty umami aromas. The palate commits to more fruity and vegetal notes, with an enjoyably abrasive finish that speaks to the hands-on, traditional practices that led to its creation.

Average price: $50
Rating: 94

Shakara 12 Year Thai Rum

Launched in early 2024, this Thai rum is made from local molasses and runs through a column still before spending 12 years in ex-bourbon casks. Spice leads the profile, with bright accents of lemongrass and lime leaf building over a classic molasses core. Expressive and vibrant, it’s a great example of quality Southeast Asian spirits increasingly making their way to our market.

Average price: $59
Rating: 93

Alambique Serrano 3 Años Oaxacan Rum

Distilled from Java varietal cane juice and aged just over three years in new French oak, this blend of pot and Krassel column distillates arrives at 46.1 percent ABV. The profile is distinctly spiced, with ginger, nutmeg, and raisin notes evoking winter desserts and holiday delights — a vivid reminder that Oaxacan spirits extend well beyond mezcal.

Average price: $64
Rating: 93

Papalin Jamaica 5 Year High Ester Rum

Blended from Worthy Park, Long Pond, and Hampden distillates, this 5-year-old Jamaican rum is pot-distilled, aged in ex-bourbon casks, and bottled at 57 percent ABV. Aromas of overripe fruit and warm spice lead the way, with pepper, banana skin, and assertive heat defining the palate. While not the most intense rum Jamaica has to offer, it’s a complex, lively pour and a great intro to high-ester rum.

Average price: $67
Rating: 93

Privateer Rum The Queen’s Share

This Massachusetts rum revives the old Cognac tradition of collecting the “seconds” — the transitional cut between hearts and tails — and distilling everything a second time for added depth. Aged at least four years in a mix of new and used American oak, the barrels are then blended and re-casked for additional maturation. Bottled at cask strength, it delivers burnt sugar, coconut, and vanilla with remarkable balance. Approachable yet simultaneously complex, it stands as a benchmark American rum.

Average price: $70
Rating: 93

The Best Rums Over $100

Hampden Estate Pagos Jamaican Rum Batch 3

Aged entirely in former oloroso sherry casks from Bodegas Fundador, the third batch of Pagos builds on Hampden’s signature high-ester intensity with oxidative depth and dried fruit character. Bottled at 52 percent ABV, it delivers walnut, clove, and brandied cherry, alongside cocoa, honey, and citrus. The palate is nuanced, with savory depth meeting flashes of freshness.

Average price: $113
Rating: 94

Isautier Rhum Agricole 16 Year

Distilled in 2006 and aged 16 years in tropical conditions, this Reunion release was bottled at 59 percent ABV with just 3,790 bottles produced. The profile is bold yet refined, opening with dried fruits, warm spice, and citrus zest, then following with caramelized sugar and herbal accents. A singular agricole, it underscores Reunion’s credentials as one of the world’s most compelling — and still underappreciated — rum regions.

Average price: $144
Rating: 94

PUNCH: The Best High-End Spirits for Cocktails

This year, we polled more than 25 bartenders across the country for their favorite high-end spirits to use in cocktails. While several of last year’s top-shelf picks are still highly favored, some exciting newcomers have emerged, along with a few trends: spirits that blur the line between categories (like Scotch aged in ex-rum barrels) seem to be on the rise, in addition to well-made flavored spirits (like a mezcal distilled with mango).

After sifting through the responses, we compiled the most popular choices in each category, plus some standout, impassioned recommendations. Here’s what surveyed bartenders had to say.

White Rum / Cane Spirit

Most popular: Clairins from The Spirit of Haiti

Recent years have seen a great white rum expansion, in which interesting, boldly flavored options have become more variable and more available stateside than ever before. Clairins from The Spirit of Haiti were most commonly mentioned here, particularly the Vaval, a floral and herbaceous bottling, and the Le Rocher, which Adler says is “similar to agricole-style rums, but with an increased funkiness and grassiness. The distillery also uses a percentage of dunder, the residual backwash in each batch, which makes it heavier on the palate with a light smokiness.” Also, these bottlings are still fairly affordable. “Like a lot of rums, some might not call these ‘top-shelf,’” notes David E. Yee, bar manager at Cobra in Columbus, Ohio, but that’s “because they’re radically underpriced.”

Aged Rum

Most popular: Hampden Estate

Tulloch sums it up: “Hampden Estate is high-octane, intense and makes a damn good Daiquiri.” While many surveyed bartenders recommend serving this spirit neat to fully appreciate it, Hampden Estate also shines in cocktails where it plays the starring role, like a rum Old-Fashioned. “I love a good high-ester Jamaican rum and this one ranks high on my list,” says Flowers. “Give me overripe banana, tropical fruit, terroir goodness!”

Overproof Rum

Most popular: Rivers Royale Grenadian Rum

Dennison and Flowers recommend this rum, especially in Daiquiris. “Rum, lime and sugar may sound simple, but with Rivers Royale Grenadian Rum, it is complex,” says Flowers. “It has the grassy, briny flavor of sugarcane juice rum that I love, but it also has herbaceous, tropical fruit notes that play exceptionally well in cocktails.” 

Gear Patrol: The Buffalo Trace of Rum Is Still Cheap and Easy to Find. For Now

A bourbon lover’s guide to the best spirit you’re not drinking yet.

Early adopters have long prophesied rum’s rise. Surely, it would only be a matter of time until bourbon drinkers would be drawn in by the two drinks’ similarities.

They were right in one sense but wrong in another. Bourbon whiskey shares much with rum but whiskey fanatics will only convert 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. However, the simplest argument comes down to numbers: if you could buy Pappy van Winkle for $130 right now, would you?

Bourbon whiskey’s popularity has reached the point where many coveted bottles — including Pappy, not to mention most of the Buffalo Trace lineup — are effectively unobtainable.

By contrast, rum offers more: varieties, flavors, eccentricities and, critically, 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, 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.

The Buffalo Trace of Rum

The Real McCoy Barbados Rum 12 Year

• Origin: Barbados

• ABV: 40%

• Price: $61+

Reliably excellent, well-made and expertly matured, The Real McCoy 12-year-old rum is named after a famous Prohibition-era rum smuggler whose product became known as “the real McCoy” due to the number of fakes at the time.

Today, it’s sourced from the Barbados-based Foursquare Distillery, the rum producer closest to capturing the enormous pull of Buffalo Trace Distillery in the bourbon world.

The Pappy of Rum

Great House Distillery Edition Single Jamaican Rum

• Origin: Jamaica

• ABV: 57% (2024)

• Price: $135+

Hampden Estate has been making rum on a near-continuous basis since 1779, and its Great House blend (released every year since 2019) has quickly earned a reputation for intense, rich flavor and a healthy dose of rum funk.

For longtime rum drinkers, it represents rum’s mighty potential. For former bourbon lovers, it offers a glimpse into a category not yet destroyed by hype magnets.

The “Made in USA” Rum

Privateer Rum Distiller’s Drawer

• Origin: USA

• ABV: Varies

• Price: $70+

This top-notch rum comes from an odd place: America. By most accounts, Privateer is the best in the country — and it’s not made anywhere near the tropics, either.

Based in Massachusetts, Privateer’s Distiller’s Drawer series offers rum from barrels hand-selected by its master distiller, and they’re some of the most whiskey-like bottles in the category. Expect oak, vanilla, burnt sugar and more classic bourbon notes.

The White Dog of Rum

Clairin Casimir

• Origin: Haiti

• ABV: Varies

• Price: ~$50

If you want to go straight to the bottom of the rabbit hole, Clairin is a good way to do it. It’s usually unaged, so it has more in common with white whiskey than bourbon proper. It’s also made with wild sugarcane and dunder, which is a bit like the sour mash of the rum world (but used far less frequently than its whiskey counterpart).

All this lends Clairin a deep funkiness that blends with the base spirit to invoke whiskey, mezcal, natural wine and rum all at once.

Clear as a Bell

These elegant (but electric) digestifs are the perfect pick-me-up, nightcap, and grand finale—all in one glass

BY AMIEL STANEK PHOTOGRAPH BY ISA ZAPATA

Once the dessert forks have been surrendered and everyone swears they couldn’t possibly take even one more bite, a final pour of something special on Thanksgiving just feels right. While I can see the merits of trotting out a bottle of bark-bitter amaro or a mellow bourbon that’s seen a few years in oak, these days I take a different tack. When I want to round out a big meal in style, the choice is clear—a clear spirit, that is. I’m talking about things like eau-de-vie, grappa, mezcal, and clairin. Though these liquors are unique in terms of their geographic origin, composition, and production, they share a brazen character, making them ideal meal-enders. Instead of relying on extensive aging in wood to lend complexity, each spirit tastes unabashedly of the raw materials from which they were distilled and the places where they were made. Heirloom apples. Hand-harvested grapes. Pit-roasted agave. Wild-fermented sugarcane. These idiosyncratic products are as lively and expressive as the day they trickled out of the still; with no time spent in barrels to discipline their rougher edges, flavor has nowhere to hide. And at the end of a rich meal, one sharp sip immediately snaps you back to consciousness, like a cold plunge after a sweaty sauna session.

As is the case with all booze, spirits made with care by small, independent producers are going to be more compelling and often boast a price tag to match. But this is the most special of occasions, after all—when else are you going to break out the good stuff?

CYRIL ZANGS – DOUBLE ZÉRO EAU-DE-VIE DE CIDRE

This bright 100-proof apple brandy is a collaboration between culty Normandy cider maker Cyril Zangs and renowned distillery Calvados Roger Groult. It smells and tastes like a brisk fall stroll through an orchard: ripe fruit, a crisp breeze,

LAURENT CAZOTTES – GOUTTE DE REINE CLAUDE DORÉE

Laurent Cazottes’s eaux-de-vie are the stuff of legend, crafted from small parcels of his own lovingly tended trees and vines. To make this style, Cazottes painstakingly dries and hand-pits greengage plums before fermentation, which yields an extraordinarily concentrated elixir.

CLAIRIN VAVAL RUM

Traditional clairin, perhaps Haiti’s most revered spirit, is rum for mezcal nerds. Made from freshly pressed heritage sugarcane varietals and fermented with no added yeasts, each distillation is a unique expression of terroir. This one, from second-generation producer Fritz Vaval, is sunny and herbaceous, each sip gracefully ping-ponging between delicate flowers and salty funk.

In Search of the Ultimate Freezer Martini

We asked 10 of the world's best bartenders to submit their finest recipe for the pre-batched Martini—then blind-tasted them all to find the best of the best.

It’s been nearly a year since PUNCH conducted a new edition of the long-running “ultimate” blind-tasting series. In the age of COVID-19, such close gatherings of drink judges, sipping from successive versions of the same cocktail, all prepped by a guest bartender, were strictly a non-starter.

So, with COVID Nation still very much a thing, what drink could safely bring the series back to life? The prebatched, prechilled Martini, naturally. The prefab format of the classic—which was an established trend and served in many bars before the pandemic arrived—is perfectly suited to this new at-home era.

On a recent Monday, I was joined by PUNCH editors Talia Baiocchi and Chloe Frechette and bar owners Meaghan Dorman (Raines Law Room, Dear Irving) and St. John Frizell (Fort Defiance, Gage & Tollner) via Zoom to taste through 10 batched Martinis submitted by bartenders from the United States and England. The drinks had already arrived via contactless delivery. Judges were instructed to keep the mini-bottles in the freezer until tasting time.

Though batched cocktails can be controversial—many people are attached to the ritual of a bartender making their drink on the spot, particularly when it comes to the Martini—the panel convened with no prejudices. “We’re longtime fans of freezer Martinis,” said Frechette, who added that she thought batching was the way to prepare spirit-forward recipes during quarantine. Dorman agreed that premade drinks are an ideal fit for the current times, when most folks are entertaining at home for themselves and maybe a partner or roommate. “I think you should treat yourself right now and this is the way to do it,” she said.

This particular tasting brought to the table a few new variables that wouldn’t apply in a standard sampling of Martinis. Dilution had to be addressed anew. Since the cocktails are designed to simply be pulled from the freezer and poured, they weren’t receiving their dose of softening water through the usual spin in a mixing glass filled with ice. Instead, water was added directly to the batch and had to be precisely portioned out. Too much or too little could prove disastrous. One Martini in the running didn’t make the cut because the judges thought it too strong—i.e., lacked sufficient H2O. Another suffered from a surplus of added water, rendering it weak and, well, watery.

Temperature, too, was an important factor. Martinis are expected to be cold, naturally, but these freezer-born numbers were particularly icy—a consideration the bartenders had to factor in when choosing their ingredients and honing their ratios. “Martinis in this format dull the aroma and the alcohol comes forward,” explained Baiocchi.

That issue notwithstanding, the panel was surprised by the variety of character they encountered from one glass to the next. And, as would be expected in any sampling of signature Martinis, there were some odd flights of fancy. One recipe called for both sherry and peated Scotch; another included a hefty dose of absinthe. The judges didn’t necessarily dislike either drink; they simply didn’t read as Martinis.

Finding favor was a unique specimen submitted by Orlando Franklin McCray of Brooklyn’s Nightmoves, who put together high-proof, saffron-tinged Old Raj gin, La Quintinye Extra Dry vermouth and orange bitters. The judges liked the concentration of bold flavors but thought the recipe would have benefited from higher dilution.

With the vast changes in bar regulations brought on by COVID, Frizell said that he both hopes and expects to see more prebatched cocktails on the market when the pandemic recedes and bars fully reopen.

“My hat is off to the New York State Liquor Authority for the first time in my life, for freeing up the rules so quickly,” he said. “We’re able to do so many things now that we would have lost our license for before.”

For the time being, however, he’s doing what most every other cocktail lover has been doing for the past year: shaking up his own at home. “I’ve been drinking my own Martini almost every day,” said Frizell.

NEAL BODENHEIMER'S OLD HICKORY

Mastering the Old Hickory With Neal Bodenheimer

The obscure vermouth classic gets retooled with an eye toward more flavor and less dilution.

The “raisinated vibe” and wormwood bitterness of La Quintinye Blanc forms one half of the 50/50 vermouth split.

If you’ve never heard of the Old Hickory, you’re not alone. A simple 50/50 mix of sweet and dry vermouths punched up with bitters, this low-proof classic has long existed in the shadow of the Bamboo and Adonis. Neal Bodenheimer wants to put it center stage.

Though he started workshopping the drink at his New Orleans bar Cure, he “really dug in,” as he describes the process, on the Old Hickory for Dauphine’s, a New Orleans–inspired bar and seafood restaurant slated to open this spring in Washington, D.C.. “It felt modern, and like things I wanted to drink,” he explains of the simple build. However, “it felt like a cocktail that never really got its due.”

Part of the New Orleans canon of cocktails, the Old Hickory first appeared in print in Stanley Clisby Arthur’s 1937 book, Famous New Orleans Drinks And How to Mix ’Em. Supposedly, “Old Hickory” was a nickname given to General (and later U.S. president) Andrew Jackson, a reference to his fortitude as he led troops through the Battle of New Orleans in the winter of 1814-15. Although Arthur writes that the drink was Jackson’s “favorite tipple,” Bodenheimer dismisses the claim: “I don’t think people were drinking vermouth in America in 1850.”

Though his vision for the Dauphine’s interpretation is a pre-batched version, Bodenheimer preserves elements of the cocktail-making ritual. The format coalesced at an event held at New York’s James Beard House in September 2019, intended as a preview for Dauphine’s. For the seated dinner with cocktail pairings, Bodenheimer sought out food-friendly pours, and the vermouth-forward Old Hickory seemed like a natural fit. Yet, stirred with ice, it felt too thin and watered-down. The solution was to pre-batch the vermouths and refrigerate the mixture until ready to serve. Bitters were stirred in at the last minute—“bitters expand in a batch over time, so I keep them out,” says Bodenheimer—and the mixture was then poured over a large ice cube and quickly served. The end result presented like a cocktail, but retained the texture of wine.

“We said, ‘What if we made it like an Old-Fashioned setup, and less like a vermouth cocktail?’” he recalls. “We always had our vermouth in the fridge anyway, so we always had a chilled vermouth bottle.”