Craft Rum in Yorkshire: How the County Famous for Gin Is Quietly Making Exceptional Rum

Yorkshire has earned its reputation as a gin powerhouse, but the county's best-kept secret might be the craft rum being produced by its independent distilleries.

Ask someone to name a Yorkshire spirit and they will almost certainly say gin. The county has become synonymous with craft gin over the past decade, and rightly so. But while gin has been getting all the attention, a quieter revolution has been happening alongside it. Yorkshire's craft distilleries have been developing, refining, and producing rum that deserves to be talked about in the same breath.

Rum is not a spirit most people associate with Yorkshire. The Caribbean, yes. South America, naturally. But East Yorkshire? It sounds unlikely until you taste what is coming out of the county's small-batch distilleries. This guide explores how craft rum is made in Yorkshire, what makes it different from the mass-produced bottles on supermarket shelves, and where to find the best of it.

Why Yorkshire Distillers Are Turning to Rum

The simple answer is demand. As the craft gin market has matured and competition has intensified, distillers have looked for ways to diversify their range and offer customers something beyond the expected. Rum is the natural next step for several reasons.

First, the equipment used to produce gin can also be used to infuse and blend rum. A distillery that already has the stills, the botanical knowledge, and the bottling infrastructure can move into rum production without a massive capital investment. The skill set transfers naturally.

Second, consumer tastes have shifted. The rum category in the UK has grown significantly, driven by a surge of interest in spiced rums, dark rums, and premium sipping rums. People who discovered craft spirits through gin are now looking for the same quality and provenance in other categories. They want to know where their rum comes from, who made it, and what is in it.

Third, rum offers creative freedom that gin sometimes does not. While gin must contain juniper as its dominant botanical (by legal definition), rum has fewer constraints. A distiller can experiment with infusions, spice blends, ageing techniques, and flavour combinations in ways that gin's juniper requirement does not always permit. For a creative distiller, rum is a playground.

How Yorkshire Craft Rum Is Made

It is worth understanding what "craft rum" means in a UK context, because it differs from Caribbean rum production in some important ways.

Traditional Caribbean rum is distilled from fermented sugarcane juice or molasses, often aged in oak barrels for years in tropical heat, and bottled at the distillery. Yorkshire distillers generally cannot replicate this entire process domestically. Sugarcane does not grow in East Yorkshire, and the climate does not offer the same ageing conditions as Barbados or Jamaica.

What Yorkshire distillers do instead is source high-quality Caribbean white rum as a base and then transform it through infusion, blending, and flavouring. This is not a shortcut or a compromise. It is a different approach that plays to the distiller's strengths: botanical knowledge, flavour development, and the ability to create complex, balanced spirits through careful infusion rather than extended ageing.

At Wicstun Distillery in Market Weighton, the rum range follows exactly this approach. The distillery starts with carefully selected Caribbean white rum and infuses it with spices, botanicals, and natural flavours to produce dark rums that are rich, warming, and genuinely complex. The infusion process is done slowly and deliberately, allowing the flavours to develop fully rather than rushing the process with heat or shortcuts.

The result is a rum that sits somewhere between a traditional aged Caribbean spirit and a botanical-forward craft product. It has the depth and colour of a dark rum without the years of barrel ageing, and it carries the fingerprint of the distiller who made it in a way that mass-produced rum simply cannot.

The Wicstun Rum Range

Wicstun Distillery produces several distinct rums, each with its own character and purpose.

Caribbean Dark Rum

The flagship of the rum range. This starts with a quality white rum base and is infused with a carefully developed blend of spices and natural flavours to produce a dark, rich spirit with genuine depth. It works beautifully neat, over ice, or as the foundation for classic rum cocktails. The spice profile is warming without being aggressive, with enough complexity to hold the attention of an experienced rum drinker while remaining approachable for someone trying dark rum for the first time.

Honey Rum

Made with Yorkshire heather honey, this sits at the intersection of spirit and liqueur. The honey adds a natural sweetness and floral quality that softens the rum's warmth, creating something that is dangerously easy to sip neat. It works exceptionally well in winter cocktails, added to hot apple juice, or simply poured over ice as an after-dinner drink. The use of locally sourced heather honey gives it a distinctly Yorkshire character that you will not find in any mass-produced honey rum.

Spiced Rum

The spiced rum market in the UK has exploded in recent years, but much of what is available commercially relies on artificial flavourings and excessive sugar to mask a mediocre base spirit. Wicstun's approach is different. The spicing is done with real ingredients, balanced carefully so that no single note overwhelms the others. The result is a spiced rum that tastes like spices and rum, not like vanilla essence and caramel colouring.

All of Wicstun's rums are produced, blended, and bottled on site at their distillery in Market Weighton. Everything except the honey rum is vegan-friendly, and the distillery is completely transparent about ingredients and process. If you want to know exactly what is in your bottle, Jago and the team will tell you.

How to Drink Yorkshire Craft Rum

Craft rum is versatile enough to work in almost any drinking situation, from a quiet evening at home to a full cocktail party. Here are the best serves.

Neat or Over Ice

A good dark rum deserves to be tried neat before you mix it with anything. Pour a measure into a tumbler, add a single ice cube if you prefer, and let it sit for a minute. The warmth and spice should unfold gradually. This is the best way to appreciate the quality of the base spirit and the skill of the infusion.

Rum Old Fashioned

The classic whiskey cocktail works beautifully with dark rum. Muddle a sugar cube with two dashes of Angostura bitters and a splash of water in a rocks glass. Add 50ml dark rum and a large ice cube. Stir gently and garnish with an orange peel. The sweetness of the rum means you can reduce the sugar slightly compared to a bourbon version.

Dark and Stormy

The simplest long rum drink and one of the most satisfying. Fill a tall glass with ice, pour 50ml dark rum, and top with ginger beer. Squeeze in a wedge of lime. The spice in the rum plays off the ginger beautifully, especially with a craft rum that has a genuine spice profile rather than just sweetness.

Hot Buttered Rum

A winter favourite that deserves a revival. Mix a tablespoon of butter with brown sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, and a pinch of salt. Add 50ml dark rum and top with boiling water. Stir until the butter melts. It sounds unusual, but the result is one of the most warming and comforting drinks you will ever try. Yorkshire craft rum, with its spice-forward character, is made for this.

Rum Punch

For gatherings, a rum punch is hard to beat. Combine dark rum with tropical fruit juice (pineapple and orange work well), a squeeze of lime, a dash of grenadine, and a grating of nutmeg. Serve over ice in a large jug. The craft rum adds depth and character that mass-produced alternatives cannot match.

For more cocktail ideas, Wicstun's cocktail recipes blog covers both gin and rum serves with detailed instructions.

Rum vs Gin: Why Not Both?

One of the advantages of visiting or buying from a Yorkshire distillery that produces both gin and rum is the opportunity to explore the full range. The same care, the same attention to ingredients, and the same small-batch approach that makes a craft gin exceptional also makes a craft rum exceptional.

Wicstun's gin range, led by the Aromatic Yorkshire Dry Gin, has earned a strong following in East Yorkshire and beyond. But for many customers, it is the rum that surprises them. People visit the distillery expecting to enjoy the gin and leave with a bottle of dark rum they were not expecting to fall for.

This is one of the things that makes a distillery tour at Wicstun so worthwhile. The tasting covers the full range, gins, rums, vodkas, and liqueurs, giving you the chance to try things you might never have picked up from a shelf. Founder Jago Packer leads the tours personally, explaining the process behind each spirit and the thinking that went into the recipes. Tours last approximately 90 minutes and include tastings of everything the distillery produces.

Supporting Yorkshire's Rum Revolution

Every bottle of Yorkshire craft rum you buy supports a local family business, contributes to the rural economy of East Yorkshire, and helps sustain the growing craft spirits scene in the county. At Wicstun, the team is small and the batches are genuinely limited. The people making the rum are the same people answering your emails, packing your orders, and pouring your tastings on tour days.

The distillery has also demonstrated its commitment to the local community through collaborations like the St Catherine's Hospice partnership, which saw the creation of an exclusive spiced dark rum (alongside a gin and a vodka) with 17.5% of every sale going directly to the hospice. It is the kind of initiative that reflects a business genuinely rooted in its community.

For businesses looking to develop their own branded rum, Wicstun's contract distilling service covers everything from recipe development to bottling and labelling. Whether you run a bar, a restaurant, or an events business and want a house rum that nobody else stocks, the distillery can make it happen.

Where to Find Yorkshire Craft Rum

Wicstun Distillery sells their full rum range through the online shop with free delivery on orders over £50. All products are shipped from the distillery in Market Weighton, East Yorkshire, and are carefully packaged for transit.

The distillery is located at Unit 1, Lambert Enterprise Park, York Road, Market Weighton, YO43 3RJ. If you are within driving distance of York, Hull, Beverley, or anywhere in the East Riding, it is well worth visiting in person. Book a tour, taste the range, and take home whatever catches your palate.

Yorkshire may have built its craft spirits reputation on gin, but the rum coming out of distilleries like Wicstun proves the county has far more to offer. Rich, spiced, and made with the same care that goes into everything else they produce, Yorkshire craft rum is a discovery waiting to happen.