How RumX ratings are made
RumX is a rum database and community. Every score is the median of tasting ratings logged by real members, shown from the fifth rating onward, with no paid reviews and no shop influence.
300,000+ tasting notes ·
53,000+ members ·
25,000+ rums catalogued
As of July 2026. These are live figures, updated continuously.
How the RumX score works
A rum’s score is the median of the tasting ratings its members have given it, on a scale from 0 to 10. We use the median rather than the average so a handful of outliers, high or low, cannot skew the picture.
Every rating counts equally: one member, one vote. The order in which reviews are shown is sorted by how helpful other members found them, but that only affects which reviews you see first, not the score itself.
A score appears only from the fifth rating onward. Below that we show “Too few ratings” rather than guess from a tiny sample. The bands (Good, Very good, Excellent) are fixed thresholds that give first-time readers a qualitative anchor.
Independence
Scores come from the community, not from us and not from shops. There are no paid reviews, critical voices stay visible and no shop has any influence on a score.
RumX runs a marketplace, and when you buy a rum through it a partner shop pays us a small commission. The price you pay stays exactly the same, and that commission never touches a rating. The data and the commerce are kept apart on purpose.
Keeping ratings honest
Real tastings from real people only work if manipulation is kept out. Three layers do that.
Volunteer moderators. A team of volunteer moderators reviews both community-forum posts and tasting reviews, and removes anything that breaks the rules.
Community flagging. Any member can flag a suspicious review in one click. Flagged reviews are checked by hand by our team and the moderators, and members found acting in bad faith are removed from the platform.
Automated checks. Every incoming rating runs through automated checks that look for the signatures of manipulation, such as unnatural rating bursts, a consistent bias for or against a single brand, whether a photo of the bottle was included, and whether the text reads as genuine rather than machine-generated.
The median scoring above adds a fourth, structural layer: it dampens outliers and coordinated swings by design.
Community data vs. our editorial
Three kinds of content live on RumX, and we keep them clearly apart:
- Community data: the ratings, tasting notes and flavour tags members log. This is what every score is built from.
- RumX editorial: human-written guides and articles (the origin and brand overviews, the blog). These are our words, labelled as such, and they never change a score.
- Commerce: prices, offers and the marketplace. These sit alongside the data but never feed into it.
When we write “the community rates this at”, that is the data. When we write a guide, that is us.
Transparency and the community score
Transparency tracks with how the community scores a rum. Take all rums with enough ratings and sort them by how much they disclose, distillery, age, vintage and cask strength: the most opaque sit at a median of around 7.4/10, the fully transparent ones at around 8.6/10. That is a stable 1.2-point difference (June 2026). We do not reward disclosure in any way; the community simply tends to score transparent bottles higher. The same sort is reproducible on the platform.How the market value is built
The market value is a research indicator, not a forecast and not financial advice. It is a weighted average whose main source is aggregated, verified hammer prices from leading auction houses, enriched with users’ own, unverified purchase prices. The algorithm removes outliers and flags suspicious cases, including manipulation attempts, which the team then reviews. We only show historical data and how a bottle’s value has moved, including the rise through 2021 and 2022 and the correction since. We do not predict where a price will go.Definitions
- Community score: the median of all member tasting ratings for a rum, 0 to 10, shown from the fifth rating.
- Tasting note: a single member’s logged rating of a rum, optionally with text, flavour tags and a photo.
- Flavour tags: aroma and taste descriptors members attach to a tasting; we show the aggregated frequency per rum.
- Member: a registered RumX user who can log tastings and rate rums.
- Fair price: a reference price for a rum derived from current and historical offers across partner shops.
RumX 2026 Community Data Snapshot
A frozen, dated record of the headline figures, so a citation does not rot as the live numbers grow. These values do not change after publication.
- 301,986 tasting notes
- 52,149 members
- 25,541 rums catalogued
- 441,855 bottles tracked in collections
Captured on 16 June 2026. These figures are fixed and will not change.
How to cite this data
Writers, researchers and editors are welcome to use RumX community data. Please link to this page and cite the dated snapshot rather than a live count, so your reference stays accurate over time. Suggested wording:Source: RumX 2026 Community Data Snapshot, https://rumx.com/en/methodology/ (figures as of 16 June 2026).Live figures on this page reflect July 2026. The snapshot above is fixed.