The Best Cheap Rum for Your Budget Bar

Yo ho ho, my seafaring friends! In the mood for a nice rum cocktail but short on cash because you simply haven’t had time to do quite as much pillaging lately? Well, avast me hearties! Because my colleague Justine Sterling and I found the best cheap rum—white, gold, and spiced! 

What makes cheap rum the best cheap rum? 

There’s a world of wonderful rums out there, but if you’re throwing a party, making batches of frozen Daiquiris for your girlies, or mixing simple Rum and Cokes, then you probably don’t need to blow a bunch of your hard earned doubloons on the good stuff. (Don’t worry, I’ll drop the pirate stuff soon.)

• Price, obviously. Every bottle we tried cost less than 20 bucks. 
• Flavor that isn’t reminiscent of rubbing alcohol. White rum should be crisp and tropical. Gold rum should have some rounder edges and added vanilla-like flavors. And spiced rum should be complex and zesty. And they should all taste great with Coke. Them’s the rules! 

We cracked open ten bottles of rum—Bacardi! Captain Morgan! Four Freedoms?—and these were the three best.

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Best White Rum

Captain Morgan White

Total Wine

If you’re used to grabbing a bottle of Bacardi simply out of habit, you should really give this Captain Morgan white rum a shot. I know. That guy is most famous for making spiced rum (and for raiding Spanish colonies in the Caribbean in the 1600s). But hear us out: The dastardly fella knows his way around a bottle of white rum. This is so much more quaffable than Bacardi! It’s a little fruity, sweet, and kind of reminds me of apple juice, but that’s preferable to white rum that tastes like rubbing alcohol. So yeah, trust CM with white rum, just don’t trust him with a sword (Reddit tells me the guard of his cutlass is turned backwards in the Captain Morgan logo—pirate faux pas!). 

Credit: Liv Averett / Total Wine

Rating:

8/10

Sporks

Best Gold Rum

Bacardi Gold

Total Wine

A little aging goes a long when it comes to Bacardi rum. Most white rum has a pretty unfortunate astringent flavor, but the aging process involved in producing gold rum takes the edges off, for sure. If you’re looking for a rum to mix with Coke, I’d pick this over regular Bacardi. It still tastes rummy, but the warm sugary flavor is more robust. 

Credit: Liv Averett / Total Wine

Rating:

8.5/10

Sporks

Best Cheap Rum

Sailor Jerry Spiced Rum

Affiliate

This was the last rum we tried in our taste test, and it’s the best by far—really, it’s the only one we tried that feels like a complete idea, not just something to mix with something else. It’s sugary and round and warm—and the spices aren’t too rooty. Captain Morgan really tasted like straight-up root beer to us. This is much more versatile and it’s the only cheap rum we tried that I would drink on its own in lieu of a nice bourbon. I took this bottle home! 

Credit: Liv Averett / Total Wine

Rating:

10/10

Sporks