Purely considering the quality of the liquid, rum tends to have an advantage over whiskey, particularly when produced and aged in tropical climates. Aside from prestige, consumer demand and other market factors, when buying an aged spirit, consumers mostly pay for the time a spirit is spent in a barrel and the subsequent flavor extracted from that cask during the maturation cycle.In tropical climates, where the world’s best rums are produced, any rums that age in those climates mature at a rate at least three times faster than any spirit in a colder climate such as Scotland, for example.