Review & Marketing Services by Beverage Testing Institute

2025 Rum Competition

Welcome to Beverage Testing Institute, the creators of the World Spirits Championships®!

The 2025 Rum Competition is open to all Rum and Cane Spirits. BevTet's esteemed panelists are trade professionals, bartenders, and retail buyers. These gatekeepers are essential in developing your market presence and getting into key accounts. There is no better way to stand out from the masses in retail and online than with a marketing boost from BevTest.

Please note that this is Beverage Testing Institute's only dedicated Rum Competition of the year.

Register today.

If you are new to BevTest, please register your company, set a password for your client portal and confirm it.

Once you do that and press the button below, you will be taken to the form to submit your products.
If you have already registered, Click Here to login or recover your password.

  • Entry into the Rum Congress Awards and chance to win Best Rum of 2023 Award
  • A professional, detailed tasting note compiled by our trade-only panel of experts
  • A score and medal for all panel-recommended spirits
  • Panel feedback, pairing suggestions, and more
  • A 3-year published review on Tastings.com with your bottle image and company information
  • Results cross-posted on wine_searcher.com 
  • Excellent SEO that boosts your review to the top of search engine results
  • A “Buy-it-Now” button on your product’s review page to boost e-commerce
  • 100,000+ impressions through our social media amplification highlighting your best-scoring spirits
  • Intimate brand exposure to industry influencers
  • Free and low-cost POSM materials like shelf-talkers, neckers, and trophies.

 

Registration due: March 15th

Results released: May 15

Ship 2 x 750 mL sample bottles (3 x 750 mL if entering the cocktail competition) to:

The Lab

OK Imports, LLC

4849 N. Milwaukee Ave, Suite 303

Chicago, IL 60630 USA

P: 773-930-4080

 

Please note: To comply with shipping regulations and to avoid a fine, you must include ASR (Adult Signature Required) in the reference field of your airway bill and affix an ASR sticker to the outside of your package.

 

Once you’ve submitted you’ll be able to view detailed shipping instructions on your account on the online BevTest Client Portal by selecting “shipping” from the top menu options. If shipping internationally, please make sure to follow each step and upload your shipping documents so that our team can view them and make sure they are correct. Direct any questions regarding shipping your samples to Matthew@bevtest.com

**Following these steps will ensure your samples arrive swiftly and without any issues clearing customs. 

 

Published Review Program Rules of Entry

 

The Beverage Testing Institute published review program reviews alcohol beverages and related products that are commercially available in any country. It is open to all producers, distributors, retailers, agents, importers, ad agencies or public relations offices. Samples submitted must be the commercial, government label-approved package and MUST be available for purchase, either in the US or in their country of origin, at the time of submission. Liquid must be the same as that which is currently in-market. Entries that do not meet these criteria will be disqualified from the competition without refund. Do not place any stickers or obstruct front labels, your bottle will be photographed for online publication. All participants agree to our usage policy. Entrants pay all shipping, customs and duty fees, no results will be released or published without full payment on account. Clients who submit before or on a deadline, and cancel their submission within two weeks after that deadline, can opt for a full refund or a credit on their account. Clients who submit after a deadline and cancel their submission will only receive a credit on their account, they will not have the option for a refund. You may replace your submission with a different product at no additional cost. If you submitted and failed to ship samples or make payment, the record for your submission will be canceled after 21 days. We reserve the right to refuse service for any reason and refund your submission fee(s). Any samples shipped to BevTest become BevTest property 14 days after a given category deadline date and will be disposed of at our discretion. All paid submissions that have been recommended by the panel will be published on Tastings.com, no exceptions. Wine and Beer category results are released 45 days from their submission deadline, Spirits category results are released 60 days from their submission deadline. We reserve the right to modify these rules at our discretion.

 

Published Review Program Usage Policy

 

Beverage Testing Institute (BevTest) is an independent, privately-owned corporation that conducts professional, blind tastings and reviews of beverage products for marketing and educational purposes. We do not accept sponsorship or advertising from any alcoholic beverage brand. Participation in BevTest’s open-forum tastings and competitions is completely voluntary. The producers, brand owners, or marketers of the relevant brands enter the products that we taste into our competitive tastings. Each producer pays the standardized, per-product registration fee to enter their products into these tasting sessions or competitions. The registration fees cover the cost of administering the tastings and overhead associated with the distribution of the tasting results through various media.

 

We conduct monthly tasting sessions by product category according to our annual wine, beer, and spirits tasting schedules, see our review schedules for more information. Participants are entitled to use only their individual product’s tasting note and score for marketing purposes. BevTest’s logos can be licensed for the purpose of supplementing the promotion of an individual product’s review. Use of unauthorized copies or approximations of BevTest’s logos for any purpose is not allowed. All uses of BevTest’s name and content in press releases must be approved by BevTest prior to dissemination. You may submit a press release featuring our name, reviews, and awards, or any print ads featuring our results and logo, by sending it to us at support@bevtest.com. Because wines have the potential to beneficially change in flavor and structure over time, if we have reviewed a wine more than once, we will publish multiple reviews for the same wine (exact brand and vintage) and always note the date of tasting. We do this to track the evolution of a wine for our readers. Since spirits, and the majority of beers, are based on a fixed recipe and do not beneficially change over time once bottled, we only publish the most current review for a given spirit or beer, so that our readership knows the quality level of the brand currently in the market.

 

It is our policy to allow licensed, approved reprints of the total results of any specific, individual tasting session for advertising purposes for a specified period of time. Because subsequent or prior sessions may be conducted by different panels, feature different groupings of products, and the possibility of product recipe re-formulations, we do not allow compiled listings of products from different sessions for advertising purposes. Results of various tastings are published on Tastings.com in the format of a searchable guide that is updated with the most current review for a given product, as we taste it. If you wish to license our category results or review content, contact us at consulting@bevtest.com.

 

Our tasting panels include senior staff members of BevTest, all of whom have had a minimum of three years experience as BevTest panelists and are recognized as world-class sensory evaluation experts in the field of alcoholic beverages. We also draw on a large pool of qualified members of the wholesale, retail, and on-premise sectors that have been trained in the use of our proprietary evaluation methodology and software. All products are tasted in flights by category, in random order. Samples are tasted blind and neat in Riedel stemware. No more than fifteen (spirits)-to-twenty-five (wines) products are tasted in a two-to-three hour morning tasting session. Our tasting room has been designed to minimize outside factors and optimize the critical perception of our panelists through a combination of natural and synthetic lighting and a standardized color and descriptive template.

 

Learn more about Beverage Testing Institute

 

BevTest’s methodology: https://bevtest.com/lab/

BevTest’s history:  https://bevtest.com/about/#mission-history

BevTest’s panel: https://bevtest.com/lab/#the-panel

BevTest’s editorials: https://bevtest.com/news-insights/industry-insights/

 

Visit consumer-facing Tastings.com and read our most recent reviews:

https://www.tastings.com/Reviews/Latest-Spirits-Wine-Beer-Reviews.aspx

 

Read our editorial blog “The Slurp 

 

IMPORTANT

Registration Deadline:

March 15th 

 

If you have any questions about the 2025 Rum Competition or issues with the submissions process please email our support team at support@bevtest.com

The submission fee for the 2025 Rum Competition is $550/SKU before March 1st and $600 after.

Please send 2 x 750ml bottles or the equivalent thereof (3 x 750ml bottles if entering Packaging Design Competition).