Uitvlugt

No: Uitvlugt distilled for the last time in December 1999, and its stills went to Diamond the following year. Getting the rum flowing at Diamond mattered more than the building, so crews knocked out the walls to drag the big stills out. What remains of the stillhouse is a post-apocalyptic jumble of rusting tanks and pipes.

Read the mark code before the distillery name: so many styles were made at this one estate that a bottle labelled Uitvlugt is not always Uitvlugt's own ICBU.

Many of the Uitvlugt bottles we list carry PM or MPM, so some of the most famous "Uitvlugt" bottlings are Port Mourant rum that happened to be distilled here. Others carry B, which is Blairmont. Bottlers often write it out as "Uitvlugt (Port Mourant)" and the better ones do, but not all of them. The code matters even on the oldest bottles: the Cadenhead 1964 is PM rum, yet in 1964 the Port Mourant still was not here. It was at Albion, and it only reached Uitvlugt four years later when Albion shut. So a bottle can be distilled somewhere else and merely aged here, under a label that says Uitvlugt, and the name on the label is the beginning of the question, not the answer.

Single-mark bottlings come almost entirely from independents, Velier the most prolific and Cadenhead among them, mostly at cask strength and unsweetened; very few come from DDL itself. The Velier Uitvlugt ULR 1997 is one of them, and the RumX community describes it with wood, coconut, sweetness, spice and vanilla. The full decoder sits on the Guyana marks table.

Uitvlugt is an estate name from the Dutch era of the colony, much older than the distillery: the estate dates to the 1700s, and its documented founder was the Dutchman Johan Berend Christoffer Frederick Boode, born in Blankenburg in 1733 and dead in Demerara in 1796. That gap is worth holding onto, because estate founding years get used as distillery founding years across Guyana, and they are not the same thing. The French Savalle still that made Uitvlugt's own rum was invented in the nineteenth century, with a US patent in 1868, so while the Uitvlugt estate dates to the 1700s, the still cannot.

Because the name outlived the place: Uitvlugt's French Savalle columns went to Diamond in 2000 and still make Uitvlugt's marks there, so bottlers keep using the name.

Those later vintages are not obscure: DDL's own El Dorado line has shipped an Uitvlugt Special Cask Finish from 2006 distillate. That puts Uitvlugt in the good half of the Guyanese split. Unlike Albion or Skeldon, whose stills were scrapped and whose styles have to be recreated on other equipment, an Uitvlugt from 2006 is the same machine at a different address.

If you want rum that was actually made at this place, look for a vintage of 1999 or earlier. The vintages table puts every Guyanese estate side by side.

At Diamond: Uitvlugt was the transfer point where Guyana's historic stills gathered, and its own French Savalle columns joined them on the final move to Diamond in 2000. Bookers rebuilt Uitvlugt in 1960 specifically to absorb the output of the distilleries it was about to close, and the equipment followed the closures.

Neither of the famous wooden stills came here directly, which is the part usually left out. The Port Mourant double vat went first to Albion after Port Mourant shut in 1955, and only reached Uitvlugt when Albion closed in January 1968. A plant manager's résumé covering Albion from 1965 to 1967 lists a pot still batch plant running there, and since Guyana had only two wooden pot stills left by then with Versailles still running its own, the one at Albion can only have been Port Mourant's.

The Versailles still took a similar detour. Versailles closed in November 1978 and its single wooden vat went to Enmore, arriving here only when Enmore shut in April 1994, alongside the Enmore wooden Coffey. Four addresses each, and Uitvlugt was the third.

ICBU is Uitvlugt's own mark, made on the four-column French Savalle still that now lives at Diamond and recreates Uitvlugt's marks there, so new rum in the Uitvlugt style still exists. It is a versatile column, giving everything from light to medium-bodied rum, very different from the heavy wooden-still marks it once stood beside. A lighter variant, ULR, is simply Uitvlugt Light Rum. Velier's ICBU 1988 is one of the old single-mark releases, and the RumX community describes it as intense and complex, with wood, leather and milk chocolate.

Where the letters come from is genuinely unsettled. DDL and some merchants read them as Isaac Christiany Boody / Uitvlugt. The likelier explanation is that the name of the estate's founder, Boode, got garbled somewhere in two centuries of transcription. We list both because neither is proven.