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White Rum is a great base for cocktails and you can pretty much mix it with anything.

But what White Rum should you buy to mix with? What’s the best White Rum for cocktails?

Those are great question and in this post, we’re gonna answer them

Let’s get started.

…Or if you’re short on time, click here jump to our choice

what's the best white rum for cocktails?

Best White Rum at a glance

Before we get into any detail for the best White Rum, let’s just get right to our findings.

Best Overall White Rum

The best white rum for cocktails is Bacardi. It aced a couple of our metrics (see the results below) and narrowly got the win.

But before we get into our findings for the best white rum for cocktails, let’s take a little look at what we’re dealing with here.

What is White Rum?

Put simply, Rum is a liquor.

All Rum is made from fermenting and then distilling sugar cane molasses or sugar cane juice and there are many different grades of rum available:

Why is White Rum clear?

So pretty much all of the other rums in that list have some kind of colour – why is White Rum clear?

That’s a great question.

The answer: it’s down to the aging process.

The Ageing Process

Rum is usually aged for at least one year and the contained in which it is aged determines the colour it will be.

In Bourbon or Wooden casks, the Rum will become a dark brown colour, but in a stainless steel tanks the rum remains colourless.

Essentially, White Rum is clear because it’s aged in a stainless steel tank.

Now, let’s go into a little more detail about the comparison to find what the best White Rum for cocktails is.

The Criteria

The aim of this investigation is to find the best White Rum for cocktails, not the best overall White Rum.

Those are two very different things.

Sure, White Rum for cocktails needs to be a decent quality, but it also needs to be available for a decent price too.

After all, you shouldn’t feel guilty about mixing expensive White Rum in a Long Island Iced Tea, should you? I mean that kind of guilt could lead you to drinking…

…wait.

Never mind.

A couple of other bits of criteria for this one.

No Overproof White Rum

The white rums in consideration must be the standard 40% ABV or below. The Overproof Rums won’t be considered here because we feel they can overpower most cocktails with their sheer strength.

Don’t get me wrong, these bad boys are as good as they are dangerous, but won’t be considered in this comparison.

We also want to keep a level playing field with the comparison.

No Flavoured White Rum

A think a major player in the White Rum game is Malibu, BUT as you probably already know, Malibu is a coconut flavoured rum.

It’s a fantastic cocktail ingredient If you want your cocktail to contain coconutty undertones, but for the best white rum for cocktails comparison we can’t include it.

As I said above, we want to keep a level playing field when consider our white rum’s and adding flavoured rums to the mix isn’t going to make a fair comparison.

How I’m Going to Judge

So we know what types of white rum will be considered in our best white rum comparison, but how will they be compared?

There are a 4 metrics:

Pretty straight forward, right?

Now, let’s take a look at the rum’s we’ll actually be considering for the title of the best white rum for cocktails.

Contenders for the Best White Rum

So what brands of White Rum are we considering in this comparison?

Let’s take a look at the list:

Best Price

First off, let’s take a look how our selection of white rum’s compare based on price.

For some people, the best white rum for cocktails might be whatever’s cheapest and that’s perfectly okay.

PositionWhite RumPrice
1Captain Morgan£14.99
2Bacardi£15
3Cuerpo£16.53
4Duppy White£19.75
5Pampero£19.95
= 5Brugal Blanco Sumpremo£19.95
7Dead Man’s Fingers£20

So there’s 1p in it here, but the two (or maybe top 3?) are quite a distance away from the rest of the pack for price.

i can understand Bacardi and Captain Morgan being so far in the front, after all they’re a bigger brands with refined production setups. That probably cuts down the costs compared to the others.

* Please note these prices were taken at the time of writing this article and are liable to change at any time.

Amazon Ratings

Next, let’s take a look at the Amazon ratings for each white rum in our comparison.

This should give us a good idea about what other people who have actually bought the white rum think about it.

PositionWhite RumAmazon Star Rating
1Bacardi4.8 out of 5 out of 557 reviews
2Duppy White4.8 out of 5 out of 17 reviews
3Dead Man’s Fingers4.8 out of 5 out of 9 reviews
4Captain Morgan4.7 out of 5 out of 191 reviews
5Pampero4.6 out of 5 out of 360 reviews
6Brugal Blanco Supremo4.6 out of 5 out of 101 reviews
7Cuerpo4.4 out of 5 out of 16 reviews

Some interesting results here.

I would be tempted to move the Duppy White and the Dead Man’s Fingers reviews from the reckoning, because they both have significantly less reviews but a higher rating than Captain Morgan.

But I suppose you could say the same about the difference between Captain Morgan and Pampero.

If I started basing my judgements on what I think the order should be, that wouldn’t be a very fair

It might be a little unfair, but those are the ratings and so that’s the order.

Amazon Best Sellers List

On Amazon, you can actually get to a page (easier if you google it, rather than actually try to get there through Amazon) that displays the best sellers for a variety of items.

For our review of the best Vodka for cocktails, we used Amazon’s Vodka best sellers list to determine which Vodka sells on Amazon the best.

For White Rum, we’re going to do something similar. BUT, Amazon don’t have bestseller’s list solely for White Rum. What they do have is a Rum bestsellers list, so we’ll see how our White Rum’s fair on that list.

Why consider Amazon best sellers list?

So why are we even considering this metric? Great question.

Here’s our answer: it’s a great way to determine how many people actually buy the White Rum’s in our comparison.

PositionWhite RumPosition on Best Sellers List
1Bacardi#9
2Duppy White#77

As you can see, out of a 100 rums on the Amazon bestsellers list only 2 White Rum’s actually make the list.

Looking at the list, it seems Spiced Rums, Dark Rums, flavoured Rum, and even Coconut Rum are selling a lot more on Amazon than White Rums.

But it also tells us that Bacardi sells the most (for White Rum) by a long shot.

Well Known Brands

Another good way to determine the best white rum is to see how popular and well known the brands on our list are to the general public.

Brand recognition is an important metric because how well known the brand is, is a good indication of a popular white rum that’s usually been around for decades.

And that’s good thing because it tells you: this brand knows what they’re doing and their white rum is most likely good.

For this metric. we used the YouGov website to determine collate the data.

However, this list of recognisable brands is one for all types of alcohol, not just white rum.

What’s YouGov?

Essentially, they collate data and display it publicly.

But here’s a better description of what they do taken directly from their website:

YouGov is an international research data and analytics group headquartered in London.

Our data-led offering supports and improves a wide spectrum of marketing activities of a customer-base including media owners, brands and media agencies. We work with some of the world’s most recognised brands.

With a proprietary panel of over 8 million people globally and operations in the UK, North America, Mainland Europe, the Nordics, the Middle East and Asia Pacific, YouGov has one of the world’s largest research networks.

YouGov data is regularly referenced by the press worldwide and we are the most quoted market research source in the UK.

So as you can see, it’s a great and reliable place to get data from.

Let’s see how our white rum brands ranked on their list.

PositionBrandPosition on List
1Captain Morgan#5
2Bacardi#10

Yeah…that isn’t a mistake.

Out of our list of White Rum’s, only two are featured on YouGov’s list of 192 alcoholic brands.

It’s interesting, because I definitely thought Dead Man’s Fingers, Pampero, and Duppy would be somewhere on that list – but no.

It’s also interesting because Captain Morgan was higher placed than Bacardi and there’s a reason for that.

This list contains all alcohol brands, not just white rum.

And Captain Morgan do a whole variety of different types of rum, most notably Captain Morgan Spiced Rum.

So what I’m saying is, Captain Morgan’s brand recognition for spiced rum has probably placed them higher on the list than Bacardi because of this.

It make sense, but it’s also backed up by Amazon’s Rum Bestseller’s list.

As mentioned previously, the bestseller’s list contains all types of rum and the highest white rum on the list was Bacardi at number 9.

Captain Morgan’s White Rum didn’t make that list – but Captain Morgan’s Spiced Rum did. It made it high on the list – 5th in fact.

The Verdict

bacardi - the best white rum for cocktails

Looking at the all of the comparison’s here, there’s a strong winner for the title of best white rum for cocktails.

It has the highest reviews, it’s the highest white rum on the Amazon Bestseller list of rum, and is the most well known white rum.

Bacardi comes second on the best priced list too, but only by 1p.

Those are 3 strong metrics that push Bacardi to the front of a pile of really nice white rum’s.

Strong Second Place

But I also think that Captain Morgan White Rum had a strong showing in the race for the best white rum for cocktails.

It was second in a lot of the metrics and it’s the rum variations top the Amazon Bestsellers list and help catapult it’s brand recognition. You can also pick a bottle up at a really great price and it has decent customer reviews.

Now, let’s take a look at some cocktails we can mix the best white rum in.

Are you ready for some White Rum Cocktail Recipes?

Now that we know what the best White Rum around is, wanna checkout some cocktails with White Rum? We’ve got you covered!

Related Article

29 Quick & Easy Cocktails with White Rum

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Further Reading

Kris Barton Author
Cocktail connoisseur and season mixologist, Kris Barton has been making (and more importantly drinking) cocktails for most of his adult life. He's the author of all of these quick & easy cocktail recipes you'll want to drink over and over again.

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