Best Rums for Tiki Drink Recipes

Unless you live and breathe rum 24×7, knowing what category a rum belongs to can be challenging. It’s even more challenging when you add in the complexity of tiki drink recipes, which can vary widely in how they specify rums. Smuggler’s Cove has a popular categorization system. Our Minimalist Tiki has its own categorization system which is based on flavor profile rather than how the rum is made.

To help people out, I’ve made the following sortable and filterable table (see below) that makes it easy to:

• Find generally available rums that will work well in classic tiki drink recipes
• Match a rum to a Minimalist Tiki category
• See a variety of rums within the same Minimalist Tiki category.

Important Disclaimers

• This list is not comprehensive. It only contains rums that in (my opinion) someone might reasonably use in a Tiki recipe.
• It does not include rums only available in limited markets, e.g. locally-made micro-distillery rums. The rums here are typically exported to multiple countries.
• It does not include expensive rums, e.g. US $75 or more. If you want to use a $100 21-year rum in your drink, by all means! But I will assume you know which category it belongs to.
• It does not included limited releases, especially vintage, independently bottled releases.
• It does not include spiced, flavored, and other “unusual” rums
• The Minimalist Tiki Categories intentionally do not cover every rum on the planet. Rather, they focus on rum styles typically used in Tiki recipe.
• If you want to map a rum to a Minimalist Tiki category, check out this flowchart.
• If you’re wondering about certain Appleton rums listed as “moderately aged” rather than “aged Jamaican”, in the book I stated that some Appleton rums are lower in the “funk” that is associated with Jamaican rum, so may be a better fit in the moderately aged category. Use your own judgement – this is simply my opinion.