Until recently, white rum in the United States has essentially meant one thing: Bacardí. Depending on where you were living, you might have found other white rums stealing a little shelf space in the local liquor store: grassy rhum agricoles from Martinique, Brazilian cachaças or the ester-bomb overproofs of Jamaica, like Wray & Nephew and Rum Fire. But for many (if not most) bars in the country, Bacardí was not only the best-selling white rum, it was the only one they carried.
Sometimes referred to as a Cuban-style rum (it was pioneered by Facundo Bacardí y Masó at his distillery in Santiago de Cuba in the 19th century), Bacardí’s product was clean, clear and consistent, which “went down easily and mixed well with everything,” according to Wayne Curtis in his 2006 history of the spirit, And A Bottle of Rum. Using innovative filtering techniques and blending batches to ensure overall quality, Bacardí aspired to make a rum that was “lighter, smoother, and more palatable to a broader array of drinkers” than the funky pot-distilled spirit that was available at the time.
As luck would have it, Bacardí’s Victorian-era tinkering resulted in a rum that was tailor-made for midcentury America. As vodka soared in popularity after World War II, rum distillers across the Caribbean doubled down on the ascendant Cuban style, churning out increasingly neutral spirits in an attempt to surf vodka’s wake. These rums all but disappeared in drinks like Mojitos, Daiquiris and Cuba Libres—which is another way of saying that they didn’t really taste like much at all.
In the past decade or so, the supremacy of Bacardí and the style of white rum it championed has been challenged by a number of flavor-packed newcomers. Mixologists of a certain age might remember when this started to change. In 2010, Banks 5 Island Blend hit the market, a rum created with the input of renowned bartender Jim Meehan. This rum, though white, is decidedly not neutral. It combines 21 aged rums (stripped of their barrel color through filtration), including the ones that still wake up your nose when you open a bottle: pot-distilled rum from Jamaica, and Batavia arrack, the Javanese molasses distillate whose fermentation is kick-started by moldy red rice, and whose aggressively vegetal aroma has been described as “distinctive.” Making Daiquiris—or anything else—with Banks 5 at that time was revelatory. Bartenders loved it, and the rum industry took note. (Banks was acquired by Bacardí in 2015.)
In the garden bed that Banks 5 turned over, many flowers have bloomed, and a category that was once frustratingly monolithic has become hard to keep up with. Unlike the worlds of whiskey and Cognac, for instance, the world of rum has very few rules. Historically, that’s meant a lot of funny business, i.e., spirits with a lot of sweeteners, colorings and flavors added. But as drinkers, we’re finally starting to see the benefits of a near-lawless industry. Want to blend molasses and sugar cane distillates? From different continents? Aged and unaged? Sure thing. Do you want to try to capture the terroir of a single field? Or the character of a single variety of cane? Go for it. White rum makers can aspire to be master blenders, creating a whole that’s greater than the sum of its parts; they can release the wildest, greenest, most raw expression of a single fermentation; or they can do something—almost anything—in between.
