Port Mourant

Nearly every account of this still, including Demerara Distillers' own, dates it to 1732. It is a wonderful number and it 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 double wooden vat still is the last of its kind on Earth, and 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, 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.

Calling it a pot still is the market's shorthand, by the way. A vat still is a wooden vessel of staves under a copper dome, feeding a retort and a rectifying column, heated by injected steam rather than a fire beneath. There is a column behind the Port Mourant too.

Here is the thing that confuses people, and the answer is genuinely good news. Port Mourant closed 71 years ago, but PM is a living mark. Because the still survived every closure, rum in this style is still being distilled, and 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.

What does not exist is rum distilled at Port Mourant itself. Across every bottle in our catalogue carrying this estate, none with a recorded vintage predates 1955. The oldest is 1964, nine years after the place shut, made at Albion. The vintages table shows how every Guyanese estate compares.

PM is simply the estate's initials, and it is the heavy, oily style that defines British navy rum. 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.

Port Mourant runs to 192 bottles and 2,485 community ratings on this page, at a median of 8.3/10. The entry point is DDL's own Rare Collection, led by the El Dorado Rare Collection PM 1997 at 8.6/10 across 130 ratings.

The ceiling belongs to the 1970s. A Moon Import 1976 tops the page at 9.6/10, with Norse Cask and Cadenhead bottlings of 1975 right behind at 9.5/10. Those were distilled at Uitvlugt, on this still, two decades after the estate that named them had closed.

If you want to taste the style without the collector premium, the unaged white releases are the cheapest honest way in. They show the oily, liquorice-heavy PM character with nothing between you and the still.