How RumX ratings are made

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 and no filtering, 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.

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 in numbers

The current scale of the RumX community, drawn live from the platform.

• 300,000+ tasting notes
• 52,000+ members
• 25,000+ rums catalogued
• 40+ partner shops
• 6,400+ live offers

As of June 2026. These are live figures, updated continuously.

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

Source: RumX 2026 Community Data Snapshot, https://rumx.com/methodology/ (figures as of 16 June 2026).

Live figures on this page reflect June 2026. The snapshot above is fixed.