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The Back Bar
The Rum Shelf in Downtown Ocala
Most bars buy rum to make drinks with. We buy it the way people buy whisky — by distillery, by cask, by bottler — and then make drinks with it anyway. This is what's behind the bar and why it's there.
Why It Matters
A Mai Tai is four ingredients.
Rum, curaçao, lime, orgeat. There is nowhere to hide. Use a mass-market rum and you get a sweet drink; use a proper aged blend and you get the thing Trader Vic was actually making in 1944. Every classic on our menu lives or dies on what's in this photo.
On the Shelf
Who we buy, and what they're for.
Not a complete list — bottles come and go, and there's usually something open that never made it onto any menu. Ask.
Holmes Cay
Independent bottler · single cask, unadulterated
Plantation Pilar
Blends built for the glass
Hamilton
Ed Hamilton's pot-still workhorses
R.L. Seale's
Barbados · 10 year, the quiet one
Diplomático
Venezuela · the dessert end of the shelf
Smith & Cross
Jamaica · navy strength, high ester funk
Denizen
The Mai Tai backbone
Plantation OFTD
Overproof, Old-Fashioned, Traditional, Dark
Larks Head
House pour on the Boca Loca
Independent bottlers, briefly
A distillery makes rum. An independent bottler buys casks of it, ages and selects them on their own terms, and bottles them without the sugar and colouring that mass-market brands add on the way out. Holmes Cay and Hamilton do this; Foursquare does its own version in-house in Barbados. The result is rum that tastes like where it came from rather than like a marketing department.
That's the whole reason the shelf looks like this. It's not collecting for its own sake — it's that the traditional tiki canon was written around rums with actual character, and you cannot reproduce those drinks without them.
Come find out what you like
Nobody arrives knowing this stuff and we're not precious about it. Sit at the bar, say you're curious, and someone will pour you two things next to each other and explain the difference in about ninety seconds. It's the best thing we do.
Rum questions
Can I do a rum flight or a tasting?
Ask at the bar. We'll pour side-by-side comparisons — a column-still next to a pot-still, or the same distillery at two ages — because that's the fastest way to understand what you actually like.
What's the best rum you have?
Wrong question, and we mean that kindly. Best for what? Smith & Cross will destroy a daiquiri in the best way and is miserable neat for most people. Diplomático is lovely neat and disappears in a Mai Tai. Tell us how you want to drink it.
I don't like rum. Is there anything here for me?
Plenty — a third of the menu is gin, whiskey, vodka, mezcal and cachaça. That said: most people who say this have only had spiced rum and cola. Let us pour you a half-ounce of something aged before you commit to that position.
Do you sell bottles?
No, we're a bar — but we'll happily tell you what to look for and where, and half the shelf is findable if you know the name.