We’re back at it!

Last year we had a lot of fun blind tasting a lineup of 9 NA rums and ranking the best, but there were a few we couldn’t get in time, and now a year later a couple new options have come to market. So we’re back to fill in the gaps and see if a new NA rum champion emerges.

Background—What’re we talking about here?

Here at Rum Runner Labs we (shockingly) love rum, but we’re also regular adherents to Dry January and enjoy getting to reset our tolerance, and relationship with alcohol. So as the December holidays wrap up we’re always on the lookout for alcohol free options that fill a rum-shaped hole. One of the obvious choices is non-alcoholic rum. Sometimes NA rum involves taking regular rum and removing the alcohol (i.e. dealcoholization), but usually it just comes down to taking flavoring agents whose taste and smell evoke rum and mixing them together. While they’re often referred to as “zero proof” spirits, legally anything with less than 0.5% ABV is classified as “non-alcoholic”, and many of the offerings have trace amounts of alcohol, so NA is a more generally correct term.

When we first did an NA rum tasting a year ago we focused specifically on bottles that said the word “rum” on the bottle. This left out offerings that are clearly aimed at rum drinkers (Caleño Dark & Spicy Tropical Non-Alcoholic Spirit is a good example). We also stayed away from bottles that said “spiced”. Coming from the world of rum nerdery, spiced rum is seen as a wholly different category as it’s essentially “normal” rum with added flavors. However in the world of NA, generally speaking, everything is an added flavor. So this year we relaxed both of these criteria and included several more options in our lineup.

What are our criteria?

We describe our full review methodology here, but we have to tweak it a bit for NA rums. The big one is that generally a lot of the information we care about for our transparency rating doesn’t really exist for NA products (e.g. we usually want to know if a rum was distilled on a pot or column still, but if there’s no still involved, the question doesn’t make any sense), so we leave that category out of the scoring.

But beyond the mechanics of our scoring system, it’s worth outlining what we think a good NA rum should do.

1. Taste Good

This is table stakes for any food or drink product; if it tastes bad, basically nothing else matters. This becomes a little more complex for NA products, as they’re often marketed as being intended mostly (or even solely) for mixing into cocktails, and not being sipped neat. We base a lot of our rating on a blind neat tasting, and while we think the ideal NA rum is good both by itself and mixed in a drink, it’s worth calling out many producers aren’t optimizing for this experience.

2. Substitute Well in Existing Cocktail Recipes

Because of the above caveat, mixing well in drinks is possibly even more important for NA rums. This is a unique challenge, as regular spirits get their “kick” from alcohol. A lot of NA alternatives use something like capsaicin (the heat source in a spicy pepper) to give a kick, but a lot also use some amount of acid. Because cocktail recipes are generally designed for a fairly acid-neutral base spirit, an NA rum including additional acid can pose a problem for your favorite daiquiri recipe. This can often be overcome with a little experimentation, but it’s kind of playing the game on hard mode.

3. Be Interesting

This may be one of the easiest to achieve, and it’s worth very little if #1 and #2 are missing, but one of our favorite things about NA rum is how much experimentation and novelty there is. From having a nicely designed bottle, to having tasting notes that are surprising or new, we like it when a rum holds your attention.

NA Rum may not be your best bet

While we enjoyed a lot of the rums we tried, a lot of them had shortcomings, and none of them would fool a blind taste tester into thinking they were actual rum. If what you’re really after is a tasty tipple with a kick but no booze, there are lots of options out there. We love ginger beer with a little lime juice, this Pineapple Shrub from Liquor.com, and St. Agrestis’s Phony Negroni. In many ways it seems like making a bottled mocktail is an easier task than making a zero proof spirit; a spirit needs to perform well in all sorts of contexts, but if a producer can control the recipe and dial in every aspect of the finished product, they have a better shot at delivering something tasty.

Now that I’ve tried to take the wind out the sails of this whole project, without further ado, here are our non-alcoholic rum rankings!

Dark Rums

In “real” rum, color is a notoriously bad indicator of what it’s going to taste like. But in the NA world, because it’s usually added coloring, it tells you something about how the producer is trying to position their product. Dark rums tend to lean into deeper oak, molasses, and baking spice notes, whereas light rums have more tropical fruit, citrus, and floral elements.

White Rums

In general, there seem to be fewer zero-proof white rums on offer. In fact, all the white rums we tasted came from lines that also offered dark rums. And on some level, it makes sense: even for many rum lovers white, silver, blanco, or unaged rums are little more than a vehicle for getting alcohol into a cocktail. Some of the most popular (by market share if not mind share) are a few steps away from vodka.

This makes an NA white rum’s job quite hard: how do you make a drink that is practically water and ethanol, with no ethanol? It’s a difficult needle to thread–do too little and the rum may just taste like water. Do too much on the other hand, and you’ll end up making something putrid. We had white rums that flirted with both of these problems:

Top Reccomendations

Overall I would say anything we rated at or above a 7.4 is worth your time, and unlikely to make you gag. Here are a few I’d call out for specific use cases:

All Around: Lyre’s Dark Cane Spirit

It won our hearts with it’s caramelly nose and subtle palette last year, and it retained that spot again this year. If you just want to grab a bottle of NA rum and not think about it, Lyre’s Dark is probably the least likely to disappoint. If you do want to think about it, Lyre’s is a good sub for aged demerara rum, or possibly even a black Jamaican rum (in place of something like Coruba, Myers’s, or Worthy Park 109).

Spiced Rum With a Kick: Philters Ruhm

Philters surprised us not only with how well it’s warm baking-spice profile played in cocktails, but also with how it threaded the needle of bringing a bit of kick without leaning too much into the fake alcohol burn. This is another great all-arounder if you want bit more bite that Lyre’s and don’t mind a sweet rum.

Bringing the Funk: Bare Zero Gold, Bare Zero Blanco and Ish

If you’re a fan of funky pot still rums, most of the rums we tried will leave you decided under-funked. However both of Bare Zero’s offerings as well as ISH Caribbean Spiced bring some overripe fruity-funkiness that show up great in cocktails. For this reason these three are our picks to sub for Jamaican rum in a cocktail recipe.

Oak Bomb: Monday

Monday’s Zero Alcohol Rum seems to emulate the rum style of Barbados more than any other option we tried, with a strong emphasis on oak and the flavors that come from spending time in a cask. If you prefer your rum taste a bit like whisky, Monday is worth checking out.