Rum mixes better than any other spirit. Whisky drinkers will argue, gin drinkers will sulk, but the evidence is on the menu: no other bottle has produced this many drinks that survived a century of changing tastes without needing a rebrand. These seven are the ones worth knowing, whether you’re ordering them or making them at home. For each one we’ve included what’s in it and why it earned its place.

1. The Daiquiri

Rum, lime, sugar, shaken hard over ice and served straight up. Nothing else. The Daiquiri is the drink bartenders order to judge other bartenders, because with only three ingredients there’s nowhere to hide a mistake. Get the balance right and it’s electric, bright and clean with the rum doing the talking. Get it wrong and everybody knows. It was born in Cuba around 1900, allegedly named after a beach near Santiago, and it remains the best argument for simplicity in a glass. If you’ve only ever met the frozen strawberry version, the classic Daiquiri will feel like meeting an entirely different drink. It is.

2. The Mojito

Cuba’s other gift. White rum, fresh mint, lime, sugar and soda over crushed ice, built long and drunk fast on hot days. The Mojito’s ancestor, the Draque, supposedly dates back to Sir Francis Drake’s crew in the 1580s, when it was less a cocktail and more a medicine that happened to be pleasant. Believe that story or don’t. What’s certain is that a well-made Mojito, with the mint gently pressed and never pulverised into green sludge, is one of the most refreshing things you can legally buy. Bartenders grumble about making them because the build takes time. Order one anyway.

3. The Mai Tai

The crown jewel of tiki. Trader Vic’s 1944 original is a serious, spirit-forward drink: aged Jamaican rum, lime, orange curaçao, orgeat (an almond syrup) and a touch of rock candy syrup, served over crushed ice with a mint sprig. Decades of resort bars turned it into a fruit juice slushie, which is a shame, because the real thing is nutty, sharp and properly boozy. The name comes from the Tahitian “maita’i”, meaning good. The first person to taste one reportedly said exactly that, which is the kind of marketing you can’t buy.

4. The Dark ‘n’ Stormy

Bermuda’s national drink, and one of the few cocktails protected by trademark: technically it must be made with Gosling’s Black Seal rum, floated over fiery ginger beer with a squeeze of lime. The look gives it its name, dark rum hanging over the cloudy ginger like a storm front over the water. It takes thirty seconds to build and tastes like a sea voyage you actually enjoyed. If your ginger beer is the polite supermarket kind, upgrade it. The drink needs proper bite.

5. The Piña Colada

Yes, really. The Piña Colada gets dismissed as a poolside joke, and a badly made one deserves it. A good one, though, with quality golden rum, fresh pineapple and real coconut cream, is a legitimately great cocktail with genuine history. Puerto Rico claims it was invented at the Caribe Hilton in 1954, and the island was proud enough to name it the national drink in 1978. There’s a lesson in there about not letting bad versions of a thing put you off the thing itself.

6. The Rum Old Fashioned

Take the oldest cocktail template in existence, spirit, sugar and bitters, and swap the whisky for a rich aged rum. Demerara rums from Guyana are the classic choice, all burnt sugar and dried fruit, though a good Barbadian works beautifully too. This is the slow drink of the list, made for the end of the night and a long conversation. It also happens to be the easiest way to convince a bourbon loyalist that rum deserves shelf space.

7. The Zombie

Don the Beachcomber’s 1934 monster, a blend of three rums including overproof, lime, grapefruit, falernum, grenadine, absinthe and cinnamon syrup. Don kept the recipe so secret that his own bartenders worked from coded bottles, and he limited customers to two per visit, a rule plenty of bars still honour. It’s complicated, theatrical and dangerously easy to drink. Approach with a plan for getting home.

Where To Drink Them Properly

Every drink on this list is only as good as the rum in it and the hands making it, and that’s the honest catch with classics. The recipes are public. The execution is everything.
At Rhum Tavern we make all seven the way they were designed to be made, with fresh citrus, house syrups and a back bar of more than 400 rums to choose the right bottle for each build, all inside a hand-built pirate ship on Margaret Street. Two minutes from the tube and a world away from the chain bars on the main drag, it’s the West End cocktail destination for working through this list one round at a time. Start with the Daiquiri. Everything else follows from there.