The many expressions of rum and other sugar-cane spirits are ripe for mixing into inventive, expressive summer cocktails.
Sugar cane spirits come in a wild range of styles. iStock/Getty Images/CatLane photo
Sugar cane spirits are, without question, the most diverse and most misunderstood category on the market. For most people, their first encounter is a spiced rum or a mass-market white rum, sugar-dosed introductions that turn them off before they’ve had the chance to discover what these spirits can truly be.
From grassy, unaged rhum agricole to funky Jamaican pot-distilled rums, earthy cachaças and richly aged blends, sugar-cane spirits span a broader flavour spectrum than almost any other category. Our panel brings together a handful of the country’s most curious bartenders (Zoe Bates, Taylor Kare, Andrew Kong, Gail McPhee, Tadia Rosen and Robin James Wynne), each championing different styles, to prove that sugar cane spirits aren’t just one thing—they can be everything.
ZOE BATES
Flor de Caña Centenario 12 Year Rum
40% ABV, around $50
Zoe Bates, who is originally from Scotland and formerly of Vancouver’s acclaimed Ellipsis, was a World Class Canada 2026 finalist and is one of the country’s most closely watched bartenders right now. Her cocktail philosophy is rooted in storytelling and restraint, and her affinity for Flor de Caña Nicaraguan aged rum reflects that. It’s a sustainably certified rum that earns its complexity honestly—through time and craft, rather than shortcuts.
Suggested Cocktail: Bates’ Upturn is a modern reimagining of the historic Flip, one of bartending’s oldest formats, rebuilt from the ground up with a zero-waste ethos. Flor de Caña 12 anchors the drink with notes of molasses, warm spice and oak, while banana peels destined for the bin are repurposed into an oleo saccharum that becomes a tropical shrub. Over-steeped chai layers in spice and depth, and a dairy-free foam of coconut water and aquafaba gives the drink its signature silky structure. Nothing wasted, nothing missing.
PATRICK FULGENCIO
Ron Zacapa 23 Rum
40% ABV, $90 BC and ON
Patrick Fulgencio is a bartender at Dear Friend in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, and well known to Canadian cocktail fans as a top-four finalist in World Class Canada 2025. He’s also a photographer, an amaro collector and known for his warmth and his ability to turn a bar shift into a shared moment. His choice of Ron Zacapa Guatemalan rum speaks of a bartender who values craft and patience: it’s a solera-aged rum that, much like Fulgencio himself, rewards those who take the time to blend and refine.
Suggested Cocktail: Fulgencio’s Skyline Solera is a hot drink that treats Ron Zacapa’s rich, solera-aged sweetness as the foundation for something deeply warming and unexpected. A house-made mix of brown butter, pistachio orgeat and hojicha (a Japanese green tea), stabilized for a silky, emulsified texture, wraps the rum in roasted, nutty depth. Served in a leaf-wrapped rocks glass dusted with cacao, it’s as much an experience as it is a cocktail.
Robin James Wynne
Worthy Park Select Jamaican Rum
40% ABV, $46 ON
Worthy Park Overproof Rum
63% ABV, $57 BC
Robin James Wynne, of Little Sister Portland and XXX bar in Toronto, considers himself one of Canada’s foremost experts on rum. For more than 25 years, he has worked with brands to help build the “rum family” across Canada and globally, and has run bars that focus on sugar-cane spirits. He regularly judges rum competitions and visits rum festivals around the world.
Suggested Cocktail: Tropic Like It’s Hot. This inventive drink uses two Jamaican rums, Yellow Chartreuse, lime juice and two types of bitters, plus turns mint sprigs and pineapple bits into a syrup with rich, roasted and charred flavour. All the elements build a complex flavour profile in a cocktail “with layers, but that is super-drinkable at its core,” says Wynne.
TAYLOR KARE & GAIL McPHEE
Tanduay Silver Rum
40% ABV, $27 BC
Leblon Cachaça
40% ABV, $53 BC, $44 ON
Taylor Kare is the bar manager at H Tasting Lounge in Vancouver, where he has built a reputation for cocktails that are as intellectually grounded as they are delicious. For this panel, he collaborated with colleague Gail McPhee on a modernist tiki creation that blends two spirits rarely seen together (Filipino rum Tanduay Silver, with its gentle coconut and vanilla body, alongside Leblon cachaça’s bright, herbaceous fruitiness) to chase something genuinely new.
Suggested Cocktail: Named for the Hawaiian god and goddess of rain and vegetation, Laka A Lono is a modernist tiki-style cocktail built around the aromatic profile of the frangipani flower. Though toxic to humans, the flower’s scent (exotic jasmine, peach, coconut, citrus) is very palatable, and that’s exactly what Kare and McPhee chase here. Tanduay Silver brings body and warmth; Leblon lifts and brightens. The whole thing is crowned with a pineapple foam that’s a knowing nod to the storied and complicated history of the Dole plantation in Hawai’i.
ANDREW KONG
El Dorado 12 Year Old Rum
40% ABV, around $50
Smith & Cross Traditional Jamaican Rum
57%, $60 BC, $50 ON
Andrew Kong is the co-founder of Bar Supernova (currently a pop-up; bricks-and-mortar location coming) in Vancouver. A bartender drawn to depth and complexity, Kong approaches rum the way a chef approaches a larder of ingredients: as a source of layered, unexpected flavour. His choice to blend El Dorado’s rich, Demerara sugar-driven aged expression with the funky, overproof punch of Smith & Cross Jamaican pot-still rum says everything about where serious rum mixology is headed.
Suggested Cocktail: Kong’s Black Apple pairs his El Dorado and Smith & Cross rum blend with a house-made black apple purée, dehydrated at low temperature and clarified with pectinase over 24 hours, alongside Esquimalt Rosso Vermouth and a scratch-made tonka liqueur. The result is brooding and aromatic: stone fruit, bitter chocolate and warm spice flavours threaded through two of rum’s most distinct personalities.
TADIA ROSEN
Leblon Cachaça
40% ABV, $53 BC, $44 ON
A bartender at Vancouver’s Niwa, Tadia Rosen has a sharp instinct for produce-driven cocktails and a restless approach to classic formats. Rosen gravitated toward Leblon Cachaça from Brazil for its bright, grassy character: it’s a spirit that rewards curiosity and pushes back against convention. For Rosen, cachaça isn’t a novelty; it’s a lens for rethinking what a sugar cane spirit can do in the glass.
Suggested Cocktail: Rosen’s cocktail (A Boy. The Kid.) is a vegetal, peppery riff on the Daiquiri—deceptively simple and quietly radical. Leblon Cachaça anchors the drink with its signature grassiness, which plays directly off sorrel’s tart, floral bite. Fresh lime keeps it bright, and a finish of sansho oil adds a tingling, citrusy heat that lingers long after the last sip.
—Compiled by Max Chesnut
