Rum Volumes Are Down in the US for Seven Consecutive Years. What Brands in the Category Need to Know.

In 2022, the Renegade Rum Distillery opened in Grenada after a six-year construction process and approximately $40 million in investment. Its founder, Mark Reynier – who had previously revived Bruichladdich Distillery and sold it to Rémy Cointreau for a reported £58 million twelve years after acquiring it for £6.5 million – applied the same thesis to rum that had made Bruichladdich one of the most commercially successful distillery turnarounds of the 2000s. Terroir-driven production. Fresh sugarcane juice instead of molasses. Single-farm, single-harvest expressions. Precision over volume. The thesis was compelling. The timing was not.

In 2025, global rum volumes declined 1%. In the US – the world’s most commercially significant rum market for premium and super-premium expressions – rum’s compound annual growth rate from 2018 to 2024 was –3%, the weakest performance of any spirits category tracked by IWSR over that period.