🥃 IF I COULD ONLY HAVE 5 RUMS…
Imagine having to reduce your entire rum collection to just five bottles.
Which ones would survive?
It’s a question that sounds fairly straightforward until you actually try to answer it.
Do you choose your five highest-rated rums?
Your most expensive bottles?
The rarest?
Or simply the five rums you most enjoy drinking?
For RSB Originals #4, I gave myself exactly that challenge.
And I decided that this wasn’t going to be about choosing the five most prestigious bottles in my collection.
It was about choosing five rums I’d genuinely want to have available to drink.
🥃 IT’S NOT ABOUT PRICE
A bigger price tag doesn’t automatically make a rum more enjoyable.
There are some exceptional expensive rums, of course, but there are also bottles costing considerably less that I find myself returning to again and again.
So price couldn’t decide my five.
If I’m only allowed five bottles, each one needs to earn its place because I genuinely enjoy drinking it.
🥃 IT’S NOT ABOUT RARITY EITHER
There’s something special about owning a rare or difficult-to-find bottle.
But would rarity alone make me choose it as one of only five rums I could keep?
No.
A bottle can be collectible, valuable or incredibly difficult to replace and still not be something I’d choose to drink regularly.
For this challenge, what’s inside the bottle matters much more than how difficult the bottle is to find.
🥃 FIVE RUMS I’D ACTUALLY WANT TO DRINK
That’s really the point of this exercise.
If these genuinely were the only five rums I could have, I’d want a selection that reflected what I actually enjoy about rum.
Different styles.
Different characters.
Different drinking occasions.
And bottles I’d be happy to open rather than simply admire on a shelf.
Choosing only five also makes you think about what really matters to you as a rum drinker.
When all the scores, prices, age statements and reputations are stripped away, which bottles would you genuinely miss?
🥃 COULD I REALLY LIVE WITH JUST FIVE?
Thankfully, I don’t actually have to!
But I found this a fascinating exercise because it forced me to think differently about my collection.
There are plenty of outstanding rums that didn’t make my final five.
That doesn’t mean I suddenly think they’re inferior.
It simply means that when I imposed an incredibly restrictive limit, these were the five bottles I decided I wouldn’t want to be without.
And if you asked me again in a year’s time?
There’s every chance one or two choices might change.
📺 WATCH RSB ORIGINALS #4
If I Could Only Have 5 Rums… These Are the Ones I’d Choose
💬 WHAT WOULD YOUR FIVE BE?
Now it’s your turn.
If you could only have five rums in your collection, which five would you choose?
Forget about impressing anyone else.
They don’t have to be expensive.
They don’t have to be rare.
And they certainly don’t have to be the bottles other people tell you are the “best”.
I want to know the five rums YOU genuinely wouldn’t want to be without.
Let me know in the comments.
For more honest rum reviews, recommendations and Rum Knowledge, visit the RumShopBoy YouTube channel.
🍹 Drink More Rum!
