Enmore

No, the distillery closed in April 1994, but its wooden Coffey still kept working: it went first to Uitvlugt and then, in 2000, to Diamond, where it still produces Enmore's marks today. It travelled with company: the Versailles single wooden vat had been living at Enmore since 1978 and moved out alongside it. The sugar estate itself remains in operation under GuySuCo, and a packaging plant was later built on the site.

If the vintage is 1993 or earlier, yes; from 1994 on, Enmore-style rum was distilled at Uitvlugt and then Diamond, on the same wooden Coffey still. Enmore ran until April 1994, late enough that a great deal of genuine estate-era rum reached the market, with vintages from 1962 to 1993. When you buy an Enmore 1988, it really was distilled at Enmore, on that wooden Coffey, in that building.

That is rare. Across Guyana's closed distilleries, the usual finding is bleak: at six of the eight, not a single bottle with a recorded vintage predates the closure. Port Mourant shut in 1955 and the oldest you can buy is 1964. Blairmont shut in 1962 and the oldest is 1982. Enmore is one of the two exceptions.

One series shows both sides. El Dorado's Rare Collection holds an EHP 1993, which is real estate rum, and an EHP 1996, distilled at Uitvlugt after the closure. Same brand, same mark, three years and one closure apart. The RumX community finds the 1993 spicy, woody and vanilla with tobacco, the 1996 woody and vanilla with dark chocolate and raisin. Both are honest Enmore-style rum, and the difference is worth knowing before you pay a premium for one. The vintages table lines every Guyanese estate up side by side.

It is the last wooden Coffey still in the world: a continuous column built of greenheart at Enmore around 1880, which made Enmore's EHP mark and still runs today at Diamond. A Coffey still is the machine that made industrial spirit possible, and almost every one ever built was metal. Greenheart is the local timber so hard it blunts ordinary tools and does not rot underwater.

What is easy to miss is that it was not a curiosity in its day. Wood was the national technology: a source from 1919 counts ten large continuous stills in Guyana, most of them built on site from local greenheart, and in 1914 twenty-seven of the country's thirty-six distilleries still ran pot or vat stills. Enmore's is not the strange one. It is the survivor.

EHP stands for E. Henry Porter, the man the estate was named after, while most of the other codes on Enmore bottles belong to stills and estates whose styles Enmore made as well. Of all the Guyanese mark codes, EHP is the one with the clearest and best-documented origin. REV and MEV come from the years the Versailles wooden vat stood at Enmore, and REV turns up on many Enmore bottles in our catalogue. KFM is the style of the Lusignan estate, absorbed long before, and named for Kenneth Francis Mackenzie who bought that plantation around 1790. ELCR most likely reads Enmore Light Coloured Rum. MXE traces to Mon Repos, NP probably to neighbouring Non Pareil.

Then there is XPD, which is completely unexplained. Cadenhead bottled it from 1971 distillate, as close as this catalogue gets to drinking the building, but nobody has established what the letters stand for. We would rather say that than invent something. Everything we can decode sits in the Guyana marks table.

The Enmore Martyrs are five sugar workers shot dead by police on 16 June 1948, during a strike over pay and conditions at this estate. A memorial stands on the ground where it happened, and the date is still marked in Guyana every year.

It was not an isolated event. The industry that produced this rum ran on enslaved labour until 1838, and when emancipation came the compensation went to the owners, not the enslaved: Enmore's owner received 35,960 pounds for 569 people. What followed was indenture, 238,909 workers brought from India between 1838 and 1917. Strikes over wages were answered with gunfire at Devonshire Castle in 1872, Rose Hall in 1913, Ruimveldt in 1924, Leonora in 1939, and here in 1948.

We include this because a page about a distillery that omits who worked there is making a choice, not being neutral. The memorial is still standing.