Enmore

A Coffey still is a continuous column, the machine that made industrial spirit possible. Almost every one ever built was metal. Enmore's was built of greenheart, the local timber so hard it blunts ordinary tools and does not rot underwater, around 1880, and it is the only wooden one left anywhere.

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.

The still left when the distillery closed in April 1994, going first to Uitvlugt and then, in 2000, to Diamond, where it runs today. It travelled with company: the Versailles single wooden vat had been living at Enmore since 1978 and moved out alongside it.

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. It ran until April 1994, late enough that a great deal of genuine estate-era rum reached the market: 163 bottles across 17 vintages from 1962 to 1993. When you buy an Enmore 1988, it really was distilled at Enmore, on that wooden Coffey, in that building.

The name kept going afterwards, though. Vintages from 1994 to 2008 are Enmore-style rum distilled at Uitvlugt and then Diamond, on the same still. Both are honest, and the difference is worth knowing before you pay a premium for one. The vintages table lines every Guyanese estate up side by side.

EHP stands for E. Henry Porter, the man the estate was named after. Thomas Porter bought the lot in 1782 and started with twenty enslaved people; the name Enmore came under his son Henry. Of all the Guyanese mark codes, this is the one with the clearest and best-documented origin.

The complication is that Enmore made far more than its own mark. REV and MEV come from the years the Versailles wooden vat stood here, and REV is the most common code on 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 both the highest-scoring code on this page at 9.5/10 and completely unexplained. 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.

On 16 June 1948, police opened fire on sugar workers striking over pay and conditions at this estate. Five men were killed. A memorial to the Enmore Martyrs 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 sugar estate is still in operation under GuySuCo, and the memorial is still standing.

Enmore is the strongest-scoring Guyanese distillery page we run at any real depth: 210 bottles, 4,678 community ratings, median 8.6/10. That is a full point above the official El Dorado range, and it holds up across a large sample rather than a handful of collector bottles.

The most reviewed is the El Dorado Rare Collection EHP 1996 at 8.8/10 across 187 ratings, which is worth noticing: a 1996 vintage is post-closure, so DDL's own flagship Enmore was distilled at Uitvlugt. The same series also holds an EHP 1993 at 8.5/10 across 125 ratings, and that one is real estate rum. Same brand, same mark, three years and one closure apart.

The ceiling is a pair of Cadenhead bottlings of the unexplained XPD mark, both 1971, both at 9.5/10. Those are as close as this catalogue gets to drinking the building.