Review: Cap & Cane Spirits Spiced Rum

When I moved to Raleigh, North Carolina a couple of years back, I made myself a quiet promise: I’d work my way through the local distilleries, one bottle at a time, until I had a real sense of what this state could do with a still. It’s been a rewarding project, but there’s one stop I’d somehow kept driving past: Liberty & Plenty Distillery, just up the road in Durham. So when summer arrived this year, bringing with it the kind of heat that makes you start thinking in terms of crushed ice and lime, I finally got around to picking up a bottle of their Cap & Cane Spirits Spiced Rum.

History

Liberty & Plenty is a relative newcomer, founded in 2020 as a fully woman-owned craft distillery in downtown Durham. The name is a piece of local pride, as the two allegorical figures Liberty and Plenty face each other on North Carolina’s state seal, symbols of freedom and abundance respectively. It’s a fitting choice for a distillery that frames itself around storytelling and a sense of place.

At the helm is founder and master distiller Tina Williford, and her path here is more interesting than most. Before spirits, she ran her own wine importing business that reached across some thirty states and sourced from multiple continents, which gave her a deep, curiosity-driven appreciation for range and style. She eventually sold that business, then went and earned a distilling education at Heriot-Watt University in Scotland (one of the more serious credentials a distiller can hold) before setting up shop on Foster Street in a converted 1938 industrial brick building, complete with a tasting room and cocktail bar attached.

The distillery is unusually ambitious in scope, housing several spirit brands under one roof: bourbon and whiskey, vodka, gin, a line of botanical spirits, and the rums that concern us today. In the early days, the operation jumpstarted itself by sourcing and blending mature whiskey while the in-house production matured, but the rum program is genuinely their own. Cap & Cane is the rum arm of the house, a small-batch line that the distillery wraps in a seafaring story of two great companions – curiosity and adventure – which is about as on-brand for a North Carolina rum as you could ask for.

Product

• Learn More: What Is Rum?

Cap & Cane Spiced Rum starts from a base that the distillery makes itself rather than buys in. The rum is built on a blend of fancy-grade molasses and evaporated cane juice, fermented and then double distilled in a pair of copper pot stills. Notably, they stop the distillation around 80% ABV (160 proof) rather than running it up to the near-neutral strengths that strip a spirit of character. That’s a deliberate choice, and it explains a lot about why the finished product tastes like something rather than nothing.

For this spiced expression specifically, the distillery starts from their white rum, then introduces a proprietary chai-style spice blend, rests it on Amburana oak, and lightly sweetens it with turbinado sugar. Amburana is a South American wood that throws off warm cinnamon-and-clove character of its own, so some of the baking-spice impression here is coming from the barrel and not just from added botanicals — a more thoughtful approach than dumping cassia oil into the mix. The result lands at 84 proof, or 42% ABV.

What I appreciate, reading the label and the production notes together, is the transparency. This is a distillery that actually distills, says so plainly, and tells you what’s in the bottle and how it got there. There’s no sleight of hand about sourcing, no vague “produced by” language hiding a tanker truck of someone else’s neutral spirit. They make it, they spice it, they bottle it, and they’re proud of it.

Packaging

The bottle itself is a fairly standard affair: a clear glass cylinder with a slight bulge at the neck, topped with a wood-and-synthetic stopper. There’s nothing revolutionary in the silhouette, but the clear glass earns points: you can see the rum sitting inside, and a spirit this attractive in color deserves to be shown off rather than hidden behind opaque glass or a wall of label.

The label is where this bottle really earns its keep. It leans into American Traditional tattoo art — specifically, the old sailor-flash style, all bold lines and confident iconography. The red-and-black color profile is genuinely striking, the kind of thing that catches your eye on a crowded shelf without trying too hard. It suits the seafaring Cap & Cane story perfectly, and it manages to feel both vintage and contemporary at once. The label-to-bottle ratio is well judged, too — it makes its statement and then gets out of the way, letting that pale gold liquid do the rest of the talking. This is a bottle I’d be happy to leave out on the bar rather than tuck in a cabinet.

Neat

In the glass, this rum pours a pale golden hue that’s as light as straw. It’s closer to a young Scottish whisky than the deep mahogany you might expect from something calling itself spiced. The aroma leads with a fair bit of raw alcohol up front, and underneath it sits marshmallow, light brown sugar, and a whisper of baking spice.

On the palate, the first impression is very sweet, with primarily marshmallow and brown sugar, and a touch of light vanilla woven through. As the flavor develops, cinnamon arrives first, followed by nutmeg, and possibly a faint thread of clove behind it.

The crucial thing here is restraint: the spice here is genuinely light against the standard aged-rum backbone, never overpowering, working as a complement to the spirit rather than a disguise for it. That balance makes this something rare in the category: a spiced rum that actually works as a neat sipper, sitting comfortably on the lighter, more delicate side of the flavor spectrum.

On Ice

Conventional wisdom says that adding ice tends to mute a spirit, washing out the more delicate flavors as everything dilutes and cools.

But this rum cheerfully ignores that rule. With a cube or two, the flavors actually seem to come into sharper focus rather than fade. The brown sugar gains real richness and depth, balancing beautifully against the marshmallow, and the baking spices step forward and make more of an impression than they did neat. That brown sugar note keeps the whole thing sweet and thoroughly enjoyable, but with noticeably more complexity and richness than the neat pour delivered.

If anything, this might be the better way to drink it.

Cocktail (Daquiri)

In a daiquiri, this is flat-out delicious. There’s enough inherent sweetness and richness in the rum to stand up to the sour bite of fresh lime, and the baking spices contribute just enough complexity to make the cocktail genuinely interesting rather than merely refreshing.

What impresses most is once again the restraint — none of these flavors overpower or shout. This is a delicate, contemplative cocktail whose pleasures reveal themselves slowly, the sort of drink you sit with and investigate rather than one that bashes you over the head with boldness. It’s a thinker’s daiquiri, and it invites you to linger.

Overall Rating

I genuinely admire what Liberty & Plenty has done here. The lazy path in spiced rum (and it’s a well-worn one, especially among younger distilleries) is to over-spice the thing into oblivion, leaning on aggressive additives to manufacture a bold, intense flavor because it’s easier than building a good base spirit. But with Cap & Cane, they’ve gone the other direction entirely. This is a distillery that clearly trusts its own product, using the spice only to add a little minor complexity on top of a rum that was already worth drinking. The spices serve and compliment the spirit instead of smothering it, and the result is a package that feels complete and considered from start to finish.

At around $30 for a 750ml bottle, it’s a fair price for a small-batch, pot-distilled, genuinely house-made rum that performs well across the board: neat, on ice, and in a cocktail. It’s flexible, it’s well made, and it punches above the category it lives in. This is the kind of bottle that makes working through the local distilleries feel worthwhile.

All reviews are evaluated within the context of their specific spirit classification as specified above. Click here to check out similar spirits we have reviewed.

Overall Rating: 4.5/5
A spiced rum with the good sense to let the rum do the talking — they’re not monkeying around, and neither should you.