Uitvlugt

Before Diamond became the home of Guyana's historic stills, that role belonged to Uitvlugt, 17 km west of Georgetown. Bookers rebuilt it 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.

When Uitvlugt stopped distilling, 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 is a post-apocalyptic jumble of rusting tanks and pipes. The aging warehouses survived, though, and DDL still uses them as deep storage for casks it will not touch for years. The GuySuCo sugar factory next door is also still running.

Uitvlugt's own rum runs under the mark ICBU, made on the four-column French Savalle still that now lives at Diamond and recreates Uitvlugt's marks there. 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.

Where ICBU comes from is genuinely unsettled. DDL and some merchants read it as Isaac Christiany Boody / Uitvlugt. The estate's Dutch founder, though, was Johan Berend Christoffer Frederick Boode, born in Blankenburg in 1733 and dead in Demerara in 1796, and the likelier explanation is that his name got garbled somewhere in two centuries of transcription. We list both because neither is proven.

One date is worth holding onto, because it settles a different argument. The Savalle still was invented in the nineteenth century, with a US patent in 1868. So while the Uitvlugt estate dates to the 1700s, the still cannot. Estate founding years get used as distillery founding years across Guyana, and they are not the same thing.

For roughly forty years this one estate produced almost every Demerara style at once. Port Mourant, Versailles, Enmore, Albion, Skeldon, Blairmont, La Bonne Intention and Uitvlugt's own ICBU were all made here at some point, which is why a bottle labelled Uitvlugt is not always ICBU.

The mark code tells the real story. Of the Uitvlugt bottles we list, roughly twenty carry PM and seventeen 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.

Single-mark bottlings come almost entirely from independents, with Velier the most prolific. The Velier Uitvlugt ULR 1997 is the most reviewed of the lot. The full decoder sits on the Guyana marks table.

Uitvlugt distilled for the last time in December 1999. The stills went to Diamond the following year, and that was the end of the place.

It was not the end of the name. Seventeen of the bottles on this page carry a vintage after the closure, 22 once you count the blends bottled under other estate names too, running from 2001 all the way to 2014, and they are not obscure: DDL's own El Dorado line has shipped an Uitvlugt Special Cask Finish from 2006 distillate. Those are made on the French Savalle columns that came from here, running at Diamond.

So Uitvlugt sits 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, and there are sixteen distinct years to choose from. The vintages table puts every Guyanese estate side by side.

Uitvlugt is almost entirely a collector's distillery on RumX: more than 170 bottles on this page, and very few from DDL itself. The ceiling is extraordinary. A Cadenhead 1964 sits at 9.9/10, one of the very best-scored rums on the whole platform, and Velier's ICBU 1988 reaches 9.6/10.

Worth noticing what the top of that list has in common, because it proves the point of this whole page: both 1964 Cadenheads are PM rum, and 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 the most celebrated bottles on this page were distilled somewhere else and merely aged here, under a label that says Uitvlugt. Old Uitvlugt is proof that a dead distillery can hold some of the world's most coveted rum, and that the name on the label is the beginning of the question, not the answer.