Barbados sponsors London's 20th RumFest on Saturday and hosts its own rum festival three weeks later.

The UK RumFest, which its organisers call the world's longest-running rum festival, runs from Saturday 17 to Monday 19 October 2026 at the Mercure London Earls Court conference centre. Its 2026 show guide, published on the festival website this month, lists 31 rums from Jamaica and 25 from Barbados among exhibitors from more than 20 countries and territories. Visit Barbados, the island's tourism marketing body, is listed on the festival website as a sponsor, and the Barbados Rum Experience holds a one-day seminar in London on Friday 16 October, the day before the show opens.

Three weeks later, from 5 to 8 November, the Barbados Food and Rum Festival takes place across the island under the theme "Barbados Is on the Menu", according to the National Cultural Foundation, which lists the festival as part of the island's 60th anniversary of Independence. The festival was launched on 10 October with a free public afternoon of food samples, live cooking, mixology and music at Stade's Rum Visitor Centre, Barbados Today, a Barbados news website, reported on 7 October.

For Cayman, the two events show how its regional neighbours are using rum to sell themselves abroad in the same weeks. No Cayman producer appears on the London show guide's stand list. Bermuda, a fellow British Overseas Territory, has five Goslings rums listed, including one described as ocean-aged.

What London is putting on

RumFest's founder, Ian Burrell, writes in the show guide that he started the festival in 2006 and opened the doors to the first show in 2007. "Twenty years ago, we started with an idea. Today, we're celebrating a community, and tomorrow we begin the next chapter," he wrote in the guide.

The organisers say more than 400 rums will be poured over three days. Saturday and Sunday are open to the public; Monday 19 October is a trade and press day for the hospitality industry, with masterclasses, panel discussions and what the organisers describe as the best place to find a new rum brand to work with. The festival website says visitors will find rums from six of the seven continents. General admission is £52.50 on Saturday and £44.95 on Sunday, with a weekend VIP ticket at £109.95, according to the festival website on 13 October. Visitors sample rums at the stands without tokens; the rarest bottles are poured only in exchange for "Golden Tot Tokens" bought at reception, the website says.

Jamaica's presence runs through the programme. The show guide lists Hampden Estate, Worthy Park Estate, Appleton Estate, Warehouse #1 Rums of Jamaica and Crossfire Hurricane among the stands, and a Saturday seminar from Alexander Kong of Worthy Park, which the guide describes as Jamaica's only single-estate rum distillery. A second session brings together four women running rum brands in Ghana, Mauritius and Vietnam alongside Emily Gosling of the Goslings family brand.

A Caribbean Tourism Organisation stand, run by its UK and Europe chapter, is listed with St Vincent and the Grenadines as its guest on the Saturday, alongside Sackville Travel. Sandals Resorts and Visit Barbados appear among the sponsors on the festival website. Trinidad's House of Angostura, Guyana's El Dorado and Grenada's River Antoine and Clarke's Court are also on the stand list.

What Barbados is putting on

The Barbados Rum Experience's London seminar on 16 October offers four sessions led by historians and master distillers, the RumFest website said on 12 September. The show guide carries a four-page Barbados feature describing the island as the birthplace of rum and naming five working distilleries: Mount Gay, which it says has records stretching back to 1703 and calls the world's oldest surviving rum brand; Foursquare, run by the Seale family; St Nicholas Abbey; West Indies Rum Distillery; and Hopewell, which it says was established in 2023 by Greg Cozier.

At home, the National Cultural Foundation set out the festival's Rum Route in a release on 10 October. On Friday 6 November, guests gather at Pelican Village in Bridgetown and board buses for a street party on Rihanna Drive, where four rum shops take part, then stops at Blakey's and Tiki Bar, before the night ends in St Lawrence Gap with a mixology competition at 6Mix. Tickets are BBD$200, the Foundation said, and the route is designed so that festival spending reaches rum shops and bars beyond the main venues.

"Rum Route is all about community. We see many of the same faces every year and we always challenge ourselves to do something different while keeping the spirit of the Bajan rum shop," the route's producer, Dawn-lisa Callender, said in the release.

The Foundation has also published profiles this month of festival chefs and bartenders, including Natasha Jules, a bartender of two decades, and Javon Cummins, whose festival dish reworks pudding and souse. Barbados marks 60 years of Independence this year and five as a republic, the Foundation says.

Where Cayman stands

Cayman has been to this festival before. The Cayman Islands Department of Tourism took an exhibit to the UK RumFest on 24 and 25 October 2009, with Seven Fathoms Rum, Tortuga Rum Co. and a Cayman bartender mixing cocktails, and sponsored a trip-for-two prize on London radio, the Cayman Compass, a Cayman newspaper, reported on 22 October 2009. Don McDougall, then the Department's regional manager for Europe, said the aim was to move Cayman's promotion from "flora and fauna" to "culture and cuisine".

Neither the Department nor any Cayman producer appears in the 2026 show guide's exhibitor list, sponsor list or seminar programme, and neither appears in the Barbados Food and Rum Festival material published by the National Cultural Foundation.

Cayman has one rum distillery, Cayman Spirits Co. in George Town, founded by Walker Romanica and Nelson Dilbert, whose Seven Fathoms rum is aged in casks sunk off the coast at seven fathoms, or 42 feet. The company said at its launch in May 2008 that this was the first spirit of any kind made in the Cayman Islands. In August 2013 the same newspaper reported that the company had opened a new George Town distillery with capacity for 500,000 litres a year to meet export demand from the United States and the United Kingdom. The Department of Tourism's events page lists a Cayman Islands Rum Festival at Sandbar, North Church Street, George Town, on 16 August from 5pm to 11pm and directs visitors to caymanrumfestival.com.

The two festivals matter to Cayman readers for two reasons. The first is heritage: Jamaica has the largest Caribbean line-up in London by the show guide's own count. The second is tourism: both RumFest and the Barbados festival are built around selling the islands behind the bottle, with tourism bodies and a resort chain as sponsors in London and a route through rum shops and bars at home.

The London show opens on Saturday 17 October and closes on Monday 19 October. The Barbados festival opens 17 days later, on Thursday 5 November, and closes on Sunday 8 November.