Demerara Distillers Ltd

DDL is what is left after a century of consolidation. Guyana went from 109 distilleries in 1880 to exactly one, and the equipment that survived was gathered at the Diamond complex south of Georgetown. Today it runs roughly fourteen sets of apparatus and makes 24 distinct marks, from a small copper pot to a steel multi-column tower.

Worth being precise about what survived, because the romantic version is wrong: most of the closed estates' stills were scrapped, not saved. Four sets made it. The rest of the estates live on as recipes, which is why a mark and a machine are not the same thing. We lay that out in full on the Guyana marks table.

The heart of Diamond is its wood. The Port Mourant double wooden vat still is the last of its kind on Earth and the source of the heavy, oily PM mark. Beside it sit the Versailles single wooden vat (VSG) and the Enmore wooden Coffey still from the 1880s (EHP), the only wooden Coffey left in the world. All are built from greenheart.

DDL dates the Port Mourant still to 1732, and you will find that year repeated everywhere. The colonial record does not support it. The London Gazette of 26 October 1813 lists the property under seizure as "the cotton estate Port Mourant", and the Gazette of 13 November 1821 calls the same property "the sugar estate called Port Mourant". No sugar means no molasses, and no molasses means no rum. On the whole Corentyne coast in 1802 there was not one field of cane.

The fair reading is the narrow one: whatever carries 1732, it is not the founding of a distillery on that estate. Copper parts were bought and resold, so a dated component could well be that old. The wood certainly is not, since it gets replaced on a cycle. It makes the still no less extraordinary. It just makes the number a provenance claim rather than a birthday.

The metal stills are just as storied. The French Savalle column, from the old Uitvlugt distillery, recreates nine marks, including those of vanished estates like Albion and Skeldon. The 1950s Diamond Coffey stills make the SVW mark, and a small John Dore pot makes DHE, a high-ester rum reaching levels Jamaica is not allowed to export. Two modern vacuum columns handle the lighter Diamond Reserve styles.

Even the wooden stills are less simple than the label suggests. A vat still is a wooden vessel with a copper dome, but it feeds a retort of the Jamaican pattern and a rectifying column, and it is heated by injected steam rather than fire. There is a column behind the Port Mourant too.

And there is an irony worth knowing. In 1908 the Great Diamond estate ran both a Coffey still and a vat still, and in that era both were almost certainly wooden. Diamond scrapped them and moved to metal. A century later, Diamond is the one address on Earth where the last wooden stills still run.

Two things changed upstream of the still, and both cost flavour.

The ferment got shorter. In 1856 a planter's manual gave no clock at all: run the wash into the still "the moment first fermentation ceases", judged by thermometer and saccharometer. A 1913 handbook records 36 to 48 hours. By 1949 it was 28. DDL today is reported at 24 to 26. Shorter means less flavour, though it is a defensible trade when most of your output goes through columns that would strip the heavy compounds anyway.

The molasses got poorer. The vacuum pan, patented in 1813 and first used in Demerara at Vreed-en-Hoop in 1832 by John Gladstone, pulls more sugar out of the syrup, and with it the aroma precursors that used to feed the ferment. A German source from 1890 says it flatly: rum made this way is not as good as rum from muscovado estates. Jamaica held onto the older process for far longer.

Gladstone turns up twice in this story, incidentally. The Liverpool merchants named in that 1813 Port Mourant seizure notice are John and Robert Gladstone, the same family that installed the vacuum pan nineteen years later.

El Dorado launched in 1992 with the 15 Year. Before it, DDL's aged blend was called King of Diamonds, and our catalogue still holds a King of Diamonds 12. The 12 Year took its place, the 21 Year arrived in 2002, the first 25 followed around 2005 from 1980 distillate, and in 2007 came a Single Barrel line bottling three marks by name: EHP, ICBU and PM, all at 40 percent.

Around 60 percent of Diamond's output still leaves in bulk, so if a label says Demerara rum it almost certainly started here. That includes the navy-style brands, though the navy story is looser than it is usually told. In 1908 the broker who bought all the Admiralty's rum testified that they "usually take Demerara and Trinidad", but also that the blend was "chiefly patent still rum", not the heavy pot character the marketing implies. Parliament confirmed Demerara and Trinidad again in 1924. By 1956 a minister told the Commons supplies came "not from British Guiana but from Jamaica or Barbados". The daily tot ended in 1970.

One practical thing about how it leaves. Since 1978 the rum ships almost entirely in stainless steel tanks rather than casks, which is why a barrel of independent Demerara is filled in Europe by the buyer, not here. Before the switch, 250,000 gallons meant 5,000 casks and around 700 workers over three months.

Rum here has always been a by-product of sugar, and Guyana's sugar has been shrinking for two decades. State producer GuySuCo made 331,052 tonnes in 2002, 233,736 in 2009 and 186,500 in 2013. Estates went with it: the La Bonne Intention factory closed in 2011, the Diamond estate around 2012, and the new Skeldon factory built in 2009 was rated one of the weakest in GuySuCo's own review.

In the short term this barely touches DDL, because the distillery was separated from the sugar business decades ago and buys its molasses. In the long term it is the whole question. If the cane next door stops, the molasses has to be shipped in, and the cost base changes.

There is a live example one country away. When Trinidad shut its state sugar industry and the Caroni distillery with it, Angostura had to start importing molasses. Guyana has separated rum from sugar on paper. Whether it can separate them in practice is the thing to watch.

The official range is where almost everyone starts and where the ratings sit lowest. The 12 Year is the most reviewed bottle on this page by a distance at 7.3/10, the 15 Year follows at 7.5/10, the 21 Year at 7.6/10. The whole DDL page runs to a median of about 8.0/10, the lowest of any Guyanese producer page we keep.

The top of this page is a different world: aged casks bottled by independents. A Le Gus't Marrons de la Liberté 2002 reaches 8.8/10, a Romdeluxe Enmore MEC 1988 hits 9.0/10, and an old Cadenhead pot still from 1972 leads at 9.1/10.

The gap is not a verdict on the distillery, it is a verdict on format. Independents buy single marks at cask strength and bottle them undiluted. The official range is blended, cut to 40 to 43 percent and sweetened. If you want to see how far that goes, the closed estates score higher still, and the vintages table on the Guyana page explains what you are actually buying when you go there.