Diamond

Diamond is the only rum distillery left in Guyana: a plant on the east bank of the Demerara river south of Georgetown, operated by Demerara Distillers, where the country's surviving equipment was concentrated after the last consolidation in 2000. The ground was granted to John Carter in 1753 and has been worked as a sugar estate ever since.

The place holds a neat irony. In 1908 the Great Diamond estate ran both a Coffey still and a vat still, and in that era both were almost certainly built of local greenheart. Diamond scrapped its own wooden stills and moved to metal. A century later it is the last place on Earth where wooden stills run at all.

By the mark, not the name: Diamond on a label usually means rum from this site's own metal stills, while an estate name like Port Mourant or Enmore points at one of the rescued stills that also stand here. Because so much passes through this one address, a bottle labelled Diamond is not the same thing as a bottle labelled with an estate name that was distilled at Diamond.

Diamond has its own marks, separate from the estate ones. SVW is the one documented here as far back as the 1950s and is probably the site's original style, bottled for example as Velier's Diamond SVW 1996. You will also meet DLR, MDR and MDS on independent bottlings, and the El Dorado Rare Collection SVW DLR 1998 carries two Diamond marks at once.

The angle brackets you see in bottle names, like <S> or S<W>, are our way of writing a letter that was drawn inside a diamond shape on the original cask. It is the site's own symbol, which is why it shows up here and, as a borrowed convention, on a few other estates' marks too. Different bottlers transcribe it slightly differently, which is why you see several variants. We decode the full set on the Guyana marks table.

Roughly fourteen sets of apparatus, producing 24 distinct marks: four sets that survived from closed estates, and Diamond's own metal stills. The survivors are the Port Mourant double wooden vat, the Versailles single wooden vat, the Enmore wooden Coffey and the French Savalle columns from Uitvlugt.

The rest is Diamond's own: two Coffey stills from the 1950s making the SVW mark, a small John Dore pot making the high-ester DHE, and two modern vacuum columns for the lighter styles.