The 12 Best Rum Cocktails For When You Want to Get Away

Rum runs the cocktail gamut. You can be meditative as you make a Mojito, treating each ingredient with the utmost care so that the mint is muddled just so, the lime squeezed just right, the rum-to-club soda ration is just perfect. You can also chuck a bunch of ingredients in a blender with some ice, dump it out in a cup, and garnish it with whatever's in your line of sight—a pineapple frond, a dash of nutmeg, a bundle of dry twigs. Like a Painkiller. You can make a rum drink that lights a fire in your belly (Hot Buttered Rum, for example) or a rum drink that you quite literally light on fire (a Zombie, which is also what you will become after ingesting one).

As spring transitions to a hot-as-ever summer, rum takes its rightful place in the seasonal cocktail lineup, up there with tequila and bitter Italian aperitifs. These are 12 rum cocktails you can make for yourself at home—which very well might be the only place you'll be drinking cocktails at all for the foreseeable future—escalating from easier recipes to ones that'll demand most of your bar cart in pursuit of a spine-rattling ABV. You pick the poison.