Types of rum: Tips on How to Serve, and More!

Rum is diverse. It is the most versatile alcohol for sipping, cocktails, and other drinks. Rum comes in many flavors and ages. This article discusses white, dark, black, gold, and premium-aged rums.

Rum varieties abound. Knowing what flavor you want will help you choose the ideal one for drinking and cocktails. Below are some typical types.

Types of Rum: Styles and Variations of Rum

• White Rum
• Dark Rum
• Spiced Rum
• Gold rum
• Black rum
• Aged rum
• Overproof rum
• Rhum Agricole
• French-style rum
• Flavored rum
• Navy rum
• English-style rum
• Spanish-style rum

White Rum

Usually Used For Cocktails

Rum's primary ingredient is sugar cane. Sugar cane is fermented to produce molasses, which is then fermented into rum. As a general rule, white rum is distilled and aged less compared to dark rum.

Certain white rums, for instance, may just need a few months of aging, while others may need up to a year. It all comes down to the rum's country of origin. It's fascinating to learn that certain countries' laws mandate a minimum 2-year aging period for rum.

After distilling, the rum is filtered through charcoal to keep its brighter hue. White rums are often younger than dark rums, but there are exceptions. They pair particularly well with Mojitos and a wide variety of other cocktails due to their lighter weight and more straightforward flavor.

Dark Rum

Aged spirits have a more pronounced brown hue. That is a general rule that rum adheres to. But, the rum's color can also be affected by other causes.

Caramel is often used as an additive in black rums. In this way, the rum takes on a warm, golden hue. As a result, the additive, and not merely age, is responsible for the color.

The rum's varied layers of flavor come from the wood flavor and color it absorbs from the barrel it is distilled in. Some people claim that rum that has aged 15 years or more should be savored for its unique flavor. Try it neat or on the rocks.

Spiced Rum

Rum and Coke

You now know that white and dark rums do not always indicate fresh and aged varieties, respectively. Further considerations may be involved. It's a bit simpler to identify the individual flavors in spiced rum.

Cinnamon, clove, anise, and vanilla are some of the spices used to enhance the flavor and these potent spices have a receptive effect on the spirit. Certain drinks call for spiced rum, but many drinkers prefer it straight up with coke, creating the classic rum and coke or a Cuba Libre by adding lime.

Gold rum

On-the-rocks and baking?

Gold and amber rums are a happy medium between younger and older rums, and they can have a wide variety of flavor profiles. These rums have a pleasing flavor when sipped neat or on the rocks, and their medium body is due to the addition of caramel or aging in light oak barrels.

When you want to add a little extra punch to your cocktail, gold rum is a great substitute for white rum. Use gold rum in your favorite cocktail recipe. Whether it's a mojito, a rum swizzle, or an Ace of Clubs daiquiri! A dab of gold rum in your cake batter, bread pudding, or bananas foster will provide much more toasted, oaky, brown sugar-rich depth to your dessert than any other rum.

Black rum

Best for cocktails

Black rum is a bottle of mystery; there is no telling what the drinker will get. Black rums can be colored with the caramel color of molasses to replicate the appearance of spending years in barrels, giving the impression of a full-bodied flavor with each sip (it sees very little, if any, aging otherwise).

Black rum was initially promoted in the post-Prohibition era as a cocktail mixer and the intention was to make it the base of a punch to simulate the look of a profoundly aged rum at a more affordable price. Uninformed drinkers' presumption that a darker, more opaque spirit means greater flavor and better quality educated the brand's decision to produce it. To be clear, I'm not saying there aren't any good black rums. Three years of aging in white oak and the use of fermented molasses result in a spirit with a lot more depth and character.

The rich molasses flavor of black rum makes it an ideal ingredient in many different rum drinks. It's best used as a finishing touch for tiki beverages rather than the main attraction in a cocktail, and it goes great with citrus.

Aged rum

A great sub for bourbon!

The lengthy time spent in oak barrels is what gives aged rums their golden brown color. This type of rum, which takes its influences from the meticulous, locally connected distillation techniques of Scotch and whiskey, has become fairly popular in recent years despite the considerable effort involved in producing it. As you might expect, these rums are not widely available due to the length of time it takes for them to mature. There is already a shortage of rum since some of it evaporates away from each barrel as it ages (this is known as the "angel's share").

While the exact characteristics of each aged rum will vary, in general, the more years of aging listed on the bottle, the more complex and interesting the rum will be. The caramel-y richness of aged rums makes it a wonderful substitute for bourbon in cocktails, but it's also great for sipping plain or on the rocks.

Overproof rum

Overproof rum, defined as rum with an alcohol content of 57.15% or above, is not for the faint of heart. The lack of water in overproof rum meant that if it spilled upon gunpowder, it wouldn't affect its ability to light, therefore it was used on British naval ships in the same way as its close relative, navy rum. A mixture of a small amount of rum and gunpowder was developed as a standard for determining whether or not a rum was "overproof." There was "proof" of alcohol if it flared into a flame, and "overproof" if it exploded like a cannon. These measurements were used to establish the standard for what constitutes 100 English proof (57.15% ABV) in later years.

Bacardi 151 and similar rums are quite strong, so we wouldn't suggest drinking them straight up, but they make for excellent floats and other tropical cocktails. And if you want to make a show-stopping flaming drink or dessert like a baked Alaska, overproof rum is your best bet for doing it safely.

Rhum Agricole

Other than the peculiar French spelling, the most notable feature of rhum agricole is that it is distilled from pressed cane sugar rather than fermented cane juice or byproducts. The sugar cane is crushed, and the juice is left to ferment before being distilled in column stills. Midway through the 19th century, when cheaper sweetener alternatives were threatening to drive the island's sugar industry underground, producers in Martinique came up with a way to utilize every portion of the sugarcane plant.

In the modern era, rhum agricole is produced throughout French-speaking Caribbean territories such as the French West Indies, Guadeloupe, and Marie-Galante. However, it will always be considered a cultural relic of Martinique. It's no surprise that a rum whose name translates to "agricultural" in French would have a hint of grass and vegetation; the bottle's origins are evident in its distinctive aroma. Even though rhum agricole has a distinct flavor that can make it tricky to mix and play with in cocktails, the traditional Martiniquan way to enjoy the spirit is in Ti' Punch. This is an abbreviation of "petit punch" which consists of a few shavings of lime peel, a blob of cane syrup, and a couple of ice cubes.

French-style rum

A.k.a. Rhum

Since it must follow stringent production processes and criteria like distillation length, French-style rhum is perhaps the most consistent tasting of the three colonial varieties of rum. Single-column stills were soon introduced to islands like Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Reunion Island by France in the middle of the nineteenth century so that they could increase their rum production. These stills required modifications to fit the intricacies of dealing with sugar cane juice, and the resulting device became known as the Creole column still.

Rhums, which originate in the French Caribbean, is distilled from sugar cane juice that has been fermented for up to five days in column stills. The final flavor is mildly sweet with a hint of grassiness and sophisticated floral overtones. Despite being part of the same family as regular "French rum," the regulations for rhum agricole necessitate a bit more attention to detail. Famous modern rum distilleries like Rhum JM and Rhum Clément offer rums that may be savored neat, on the rocks, or mixed into a fruity punch with only a dash of sugar or citrus to highlight the spirit's inherent flavor.

Flavored rum

Simply put, flavored rum is any rum that has been flavored with additives other than natural spices or infusions like those found in spiced rums. Before the addition of the flavorings and colorings, the rum used to make these beverages starts as a neutral, sweet rum. To illustrate the breadth of this category, consider the fact that you can choose from simple tropical infusions such as pineapple and coconut to more complex flavor profiles like coffee, chocolate, and cherry vanilla.

Malibu, a rum with prominent coconut undertones, is among the market's most sought-after flavored rums. The trendy hybrid spirits that share this category include Rumchata, a cream liqueur that combines the flavors of rum, and horchata, a popular rice-based drink in Latin America.

Navy rum

Rum has always been associated with pirates, but it was recently discovered that the British navy had such a penchant for the alcohol that it even developed its own signature rum cocktail recipe. Navy rum is a type of blended matured rum that often contains rums from a number of distinct rum-producing colonies. It gets its name from the fact that it is similar to the rum carried by the early British navy, which was a mixture of rums from several ports in the Caribbean and South America. Imagine how variable a ship's assortment of rum would be depending on where it docked, given that each colony made its own and sailors routinely snatched casks to bring with them.

When it became clear that the entire British navy would need access to rum, the navy partnered with James Man in 1784 to produce a uniform blend of rum that could be supplied to all of the navy's shipsThe manufacture of official navy rum halted in the 1970, but if you're willing to put in the time and money, you may still find a genuine bottle of navy rum today.

English style rum

These molasses-based rums are created in British colonies like Barbados, Guyana, St. Lucia, and Jamaica using traditional processes — mainly pot-still distillation, though some newer incarnations make use of the column still — and are regarded as the first iteration of the colonial rums (before the French and Spanish colonies). When it comes to rum production, these colonies were centuries ahead of their French and Spanish contemporaries. And since they were so adept at it, they persisted with the tried-and-true production method of pot distillation for decades; column-distilled rums were considered inferior until the technology took off in the late 1800s (via Cocktail Wonk).

Today's British rums are distinguished by their fermentation process, which utilizes wild yeasts to transform a molasses base rather than cane juice, and by the distilling method (a combination of pot and column distillation). Try them on the rocks; they're sweet and rich just the way you like them.

Spanish-style rum

a.k.a. Ron

Until 1796, Spain forbade any of her colonies from creating rum or other distilled spirits when production in the Caribbean began to boom. These rums are produced in territories that were once part of Spain, including as Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic, with Baracrdi being the most well-known. Bacardi pioneered the charcoal filtration procedure during maturing to make the spirit lighter and less strong, and this is what sets Spanish-style rum apart from other types of rum.

The solera barrel aging system is another sherry- and brandy-inspired process that has been adapted for use in Spanish rum production. To make rum, a criadera (a stack of barrels) is arranged so that the youngest, unaged spirit goes into the top barrels and the oldest, completed rum is drawn from the bottom barrels. Ultimately, this method guarantees that the rum has reached a sophisticated, fully mature state before bottling. As the barrels the spirit is matured in provide most of the flavor rather than the distillation process, these rums are smooth and easy to drink.