Key West Rum Fest ran seven days this year — Monday 10 August to Sunday 16 August 2026. A full week. Most spirits festivals are a weekend, and a good many are a single afternoon in a convention hall.
Bombarda has been a main sponsor since the founder started the thing three years ago. We were there for the first one, and we have been there every year since.
Three years in
2024, 2025, 2026 — each edition bigger than the last, and the 2027 sponsorship slots are already open.
Being in from the start has meant watching it grow from an idea into a week that the town organises itself around. That is not a common thing to witness, and it is the reason we keep coming back rather than treating it as another booth on a circuit.
The growth is not really about rum festivals as a category, though that category is expanding. It is about Key West being the correct place for one. Ninety miles from Cuba, at the end of a chain of islands built on wrecking and running goods, in a town that has never needed an excuse to pour a drink.
The organisers call it the Conch Rumpublic, which is exactly the right joke.
What actually happens
A week-long format allows things a weekend does not.
The Grand Tasting — the core of it. Brands pouring side by side, which for rum is not a luxury but the only reliable way to learn the category.
The Sandbar Trip — a boat, a sandbar, rum. Difficult to improve on.
The Rum Passport — participating bars and restaurants across Key West serving festival cocktails through the week, with a passport to work your way around them. This is the part that turns a festival into a town-wide event, and it is why the week-long format matters. You are not tasting in a tent; you are drinking in real bars, made by real bartenders.
The Rum Cake Competition — genuinely competitive, and a reminder that rum has a culinary life beyond the glass.
Original art and featured artists — commissioned work each year, sold at the event.
The 2026 official mixer was Reál Infused Exotics, whose syrups turned up in cocktails at participating venues across the week.
It raises money, and we give to it
The festival partners with MARC House — the Monroe Association for ReMARCable Citizens — which supports adults with developmental disabilities in the Florida Keys. One hundred per cent of donations go to the organisation.
Bombarda has donated to the cause as part of our sponsorship. It is a good reason to be involved with an event and a better reason to keep being involved with it.
Key West has been good to us
We have a real following down there, and it was not built by advertising. It was built by pouring at the same event three years running, by bartenders who put our rums on their back bars, and by people who tasted something at the Grand Tasting and then went looking for it.
That is the honest version of how a small brand grows. Slowly, in one town at a time, with people who actually drink the stuff.
Three questions to ask on a festival floor
If you are tasting widely, these will tell you more than any label:
Does it taste sweet on its own? If yes, it has probably been sweetened at the bottling line. Not automatically bad — but you should know, because most producers will not tell you.
What does the age statement refer to? In rum it may mean the oldest component rather than the youngest, which is not how whisky works. Ask.
Tropical or continental ageing? Eight years in the Caribbean is not eight years in a cold warehouse. The angels take three to five times as much.
Put a Jamaican pot still rum next to a Panamanian column still rum next to a Demerara wooden Coffey still rum and the differences stop being abstract. Nobody needs that explained twice.
Why the Keys, for us
Bombarda is a South Florida company and the Keys are home water.
The Capitana El Rubí, flagship of the 1733 Nueva España treasure fleet, went down on these reefs in a hurricane and rests today in about twenty feet of water off Plantation Key. Our Capitana is named for her. And the idea for the whole brand arrived at the Dry Tortugas, seventy miles west of Key West, looking at the guns on the walls of Fort Jefferson.
Our rums are blended with no added sugar, no caramel colorant and no chill filtration — which is exactly the thing worth testing on a festival floor. Taste ours next to something you already know. That comparison is the whole argument.
See you in 2027
Dates for the next edition have not been announced. Given the pattern, plan for August and book early — Key West in high season fills up, and the festival offers discounted lodging through its own site.
We will be there. We have been every year.
Full details, schedules and tickets: rumfestkeywest.com
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