Port Mourant

Port Mourant is heavy and oily, with liquorice running through it: the style that defines British navy rum. The usual way in is DDL's own Rare Collection, such as the El Dorado Rare Collection PM 1997, which the RumX community describes with wood, leather, roast, orange peel and liquorice. If you want the style with nothing between you and the still, the unaged white releases show the oily, liquorice-heavy PM character straight off the wooden vats; on the white S.B.S release the community also picks out salt, spice, vanilla and brine.

Yes: the distillery closed in 1955, but PM is a living mark, because its still survived every closure and runs at Diamond today. Our catalogue runs to vintages as recent as 2021; the S.B.S Port Mourant 2021 is unaged white, straight off that still.

That puts Port Mourant in the good half of the Guyanese split. Where an estate's still was scrapped, as at Albion or Skeldon, the style has to be recreated on other equipment. Here it is the same machine, just at a different address. A PM from 1975 and a PM from 2021 came out of the same wooden vats: the famous 1970s bottlings, such as the Moon Import 1976 and the 1975 releases from Norse Cask and Cadenhead, were distilled at Uitvlugt on this still, two decades after the estate that named them had closed. The vintages table sets the closing year of every Guyanese estate against the oldest vintage we list.

Not as a founding year: nearly every account of this still, including Demerara Distillers' own, dates it to 1732, and that wonderful number does not survive contact with the colonial record.

The London Gazette of 26 October 1813 announces a seizure against Stephen Mourant and describes the property, twice, as "the cotton estate Port Mourant". The Gazette of 13 November 1821 announces another seizure against the same man and calls the same property "the sugar estate called Port Mourant". In between, the estate switched crops. On the whole Corentyne coast in 1802 there was not a single field of cane.

Rum in this era was a by-product of sugar. No cane means no molasses, and no molasses means no distillery. Whatever 1732 refers to, it is not the founding of a rum distillery on this estate. The plausible reading is a dated copper component bought second hand, which was ordinary practice; the wood certainly is not original, since it gets replaced on a cycle. None of that makes the still less remarkable. It makes the number a provenance claim rather than a birthday.

The Port Mourant still stands at Diamond, run by Demerara Distillers, and it is the last double wooden vat still of its kind on Earth. It has moved house three times. Port Mourant's distillery closed in 1955. The still went first to Albion, where a new distillery had just been built, and stayed there until Albion itself shut in January 1968. Then to Uitvlugt until 1999, and finally to Diamond in 2000, where it runs today.

The Albion leg is the part usually skipped. The evidence for it is a plant manager's résumé covering Albion from 1965 to 1967, which lists a pot still batch plant operating there. By that date Guyana had only two wooden pot stills left in the entire country, and Versailles was still running its own. The one at Albion can only have been this one.

PM is simply the estate's initials, and it stands for the heavy, oily style made on the double wooden vat still. It is by far the most common code you will meet here.

MPM almost certainly reads Modified Port Mourant, a variant of the same style. UPM turns up on bottles distilled while the still stood at Uitvlugt and reads as Uitvlugt Port Mourant. You will also see GM on a few old Cadenhead bottlings from the mid-1970s; what it stands for is not established, though the rum is noticeably lighter than standard PM.

Because the still moved so often, a bottle's distillery name and its mark tell you different things. Plenty of PM rum is labelled Uitvlugt or Diamond, because that is where it was distilled. The mark is what identifies the style. The Guyana marks table decodes the full set.