Stocking a Rum Shelf From Scratch

Eight bottles that cover nearly every classic exotic cocktail, chosen by style rather than by brand.

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The question I get most often is which rum to buy. The honest answer is that it’s the wrong question — you want to buy styles, and the specific bottle matters much less than covering the range.

Here’s a shelf that will make almost any classic exotic cocktail, in rough priority order.

The first four

  1. Blended lightly aged. The workhorse. Daiquiris, most highballs, anything that needs rum without a strong point of view.
  2. Blended aged. Richer, more oak. The base of a Mai Tai and a hundred other drinks.
  3. Jamaican pot still, unaged or lightly aged. Your funk source. You’ll use it half an ounce at a time and it will transform drinks.
  4. Black blended. Molasses-heavy and dark. Essential for a whole family of drinks, and unmatched as a float.

Four bottles gets you most of the way. If you stop here you can still make a great Daiquiri, a proper Mai Tai, and a credible Zombie.

The next four

  1. Demerara, aged. Guyanese, distinctive, smoky-sweet. Several classics specifically want it.
  2. Column still aged. Softer and cleaner — for drinks where you want the rum present but polite.
  3. Rhum agricole blanc. Grassy and vegetal. Opens up Ti’ Punch and gives you an entirely different register to work in.
  4. Overproof. For floats, for flaming, and for drinks that genuinely call for it. A little goes a very long way.

What to skip early

Spiced rum, unless you have a specific drink in mind — most of it is sweetened and flavored to cover for a mediocre base spirit, and you can add your own spices with far more control.

Very long aged, expensive bottlings. They’re wonderful and they’re for drinking neat. Putting a twenty-five-year rum in a drink with lime and orgeat wastes both.

On price

Rum remains the best value in spirits, by some distance. There’s no prestige tax the way there is with Scotch or Cognac, and the bottles that do the most work behind the bar are frequently the cheap ones. Spend the money on covering more styles, not on going further up any single one.