Guyana Rum

Demerara rum is rum from Guyana, named for the Demerara river and the region around the capital, and protected by a Geographical Indication. So in practice it is the same thing as Guyanese rum: Demerara is the region and the protected name.

Its signature is a heavy, dark, pot-still character, much of it from greenheart wooden stills. Demerara is also the traditional base of British navy rum, and navy-style brands like Pusser's, Lemon Hart and Lamb's are built on Demerara rum from Diamond.

They are marks, not brands: codes stamped on the cask for the style of a closed estate, so PM is Port Mourant, EHP is Enmore after E. Henry Porter who named the estate, and SWR is Skeldon. Every closed estate lives on this way. It is tempting to read a mark as a machine, and almost every guide does. That is wrong, and the exceptions prove it: the mark KFM belongs to the Lusignan estate, but a Cadenhead bottling from 1991 carrying it was distilled on the Versailles wooden pot still. The Albion mark AW has been made on at least three different stills over the decades.

A mark tells you the intended style. Which machine produced it has changed, sometimes more than once, and one still can produce several marks. That is the useful thing to know, because it means a mark can outlive its distillery, its still, and its estate, and still taste like itself. The table decodes the ones you will actually meet.

El Dorado, Guyana's flagship brand, is blended, cut to 40 to 43 percent and sweetened, while the names of the dead estates reach the market only through independents buying single marks and bottling them at cask strength. There is no supermarket version of Blairmont. El Dorado is the usual way in, especially the 12 Year and the 15 Year.

Today exactly one: Demerara Distillers at Diamond, the last of the 109 distilleries Guyana had in the 1880/81 fiscal year. The collapse is documented year by year: 55 by 1898/99, 42 still active in July 1906, 36 in 1914, 30 in 1921, and just nine from 1938 onwards. Five were left at independence in 1966 and three by 1971.

The first and steepest fall had nothing to do with rum. European governments poured subsidies into beet sugar through the 1880s, the United States put a tariff on sugar in 1893, and cane colonies that lived off one crop were hit at the root. Half of Guyana's distilleries died in twenty years because the sugar under them did.

What makes Diamond a living museum is not that everything was saved. Most of it was scrapped. Four sets of apparatus survived: the Port Mourant double wooden vat still, the Versailles single wooden vat, the Enmore wooden Coffey still, and the French Savalle columns from Uitvlugt. Everything else lives on as a recipe.

Only if its vintage predates the estate's closure, and for six of the eight closed estates not a single bottle with a recorded vintage does. When you buy a bottle labelled Albion or Skeldon, those distilleries were already closed, not recently but decades before the rum in the bottle was distilled. Albion's distillery closed in January 1968, so an Albion 1994 was distilled somewhere else, almost certainly on the French Savalle column at Uitvlugt or Diamond.

We can check this, because we hold both halves: the archive says when each distillery stopped, and our catalogue says when each bottle was distilled. The El Dorado Skeldon SWR 2000 was distilled forty years after Skeldon shut. The Velier Blairmont 1991 came twenty-nine years after Blairmont did. Compare the vintage on your label with the closure year in the table below and you will know which you have.

This does not make them fake, and it is not a reason to avoid them. It changes what you are buying. Where the still survived, you get the same machine in a different building. Where it did not, you get a careful recreation of a style on other equipment. Both are real Demerara. Only one is the original machine.

Because metal was scarce and greenheart wood was abundant, so early distillers built their stills from it: greenheart is a local timber so hard it cannot be cut with ordinary tools, and it does not rot underwater.

Calling them pot stills is the market's shorthand. A contemporary description from 1908 is more precise: a vat still is a cylindrical wooden vessel of staves hooped with wrought iron, topped by a copper dome, fed into a retort of the Jamaican pattern, with a rectifying column downstream. It is heated by injecting steam, not by fire underneath. Even the Port Mourant still has a column behind it.

And wood was not a quirk, it was the national technology. In 1914, 27 of Guyana's 36 distilleries still ran pot or vat stills, and a 1919 source counts ten large continuous stills built mostly on site from local greenheart. Guyana is simply the last place where any of them survived.

Mostly from added colouring, not from the wood: Demerara's colour is a tradition of addition, and we know the recipe because a planter wrote it down. Alexander Mac Rae ran the Lusignan estate, the one behind the KFM mark, and in 1856 he published how to make colouring for rum: take the best sugar, melt it over its own fire, stir it constantly with a wooden paddle so it never picks up "a singed taste or flavour", then thin it not with water but with high wines, rum feints, until it reaches the consistency of thick cream.

It was then settled in a cask fitted with two taps, one two inches from the bottom and one six, so the sediment could drop out below and the clear colouring could be drawn off above. About three pints per 100 gallons of spirit. Mac Rae's warning is the one that still matters: too much and the rum turns cloudy, "and when rum is cloudy the value of it is very greatly deteriorated".

Colour was a market specification, not a quality signal. A 1949 government report is blunt about it: Canada and northern Britain wanted their rum dark, true Nelson's blood, the Midlands wanted a paler shade, and the south of England preferred it almost white. Same rum, different customers, different amount of burnt sugar. The modern version of that argument is about sweetening rather than colouring, and if you would rather avoid both, start with the unsweetened rums.

Bookers Guiana is what Guyanese used to jokingly call British Guiana, because one group, Booker Brothers, came to own the cane, the distilleries, the blend and the label. Josias Booker arrived in 1815 and founded Booker Brothers in 1834. By 1917 the group owned Port Mourant, Skeldon, Uitvlugt, La Bonne Intention and more, and a merger in 1939 added Albion and Enmore. Then in 1947 it absorbed United Rum Merchants, which held the rights to Lamb's Navy Rum, Lemon Hart, Red Heart and Black Heart.

So when a guide tells you those navy brands relied on Demerara rum, that undersells it. They were not customers, they were the same company, with only Seagram's OVD and Wood's opposite them. It was a Diageo before Diageo existed. And it was Bookers' own rationalisation that killed the estates: Uitvlugt was rebuilt in 1960 to absorb the output of four distilleries, and La Bonne Intention, Skeldon, Blairmont and Albion were shut to feed it. Nationalisation ended the group's grip in 1976.

The other half of that story belongs on the same page. This industry ran on enslaved people until 1838, and the compensation paid at emancipation went to the owners, not the enslaved: 83,530 pounds to the Blairmont estate's owner for 1,598 people, 35,960 to Enmore's for 569. What followed was indenture, 238,909 workers brought from India between 1838 and 1917. Strikes over pay were answered with gunfire more than once, at Rose Hall in 1913 and at Ruimveldt in 1924. In June 1948, five workers were shot dead at Enmore. The memorial to the Enmore Martyrs still stands where the sugar estate does.