Rum · Maker · Short entry

Diamond Distillery (Demerara Distillers)

Guyanese rum distillery that gathered the stills of closed plantation distilleries. Its wooden Port Mourant, Versailles and Enmore stills are said to be the last working wooden stills.

Location: Demerara, near Georgetown, Guyana

Status

Still histories come from a trade guide and are not documented here; the 1732 date attached to the Port Mourant still is unconfirmed.

The wooden stills

According to Difford's Guide, Diamond runs nine stills, including three wooden ones: the Port Mourant double wooden pot still (3,000 and 2,000 gallons), the Versailles single wooden pot still (2,000 gallons) and the Enmore wooden Coffey still, said to have been built in 1880. The guide says they came to Diamond as Guyana's other distilleries closed, and calls them the last operating wooden stills in the world.

The guide repeats a claim that the Port Mourant still came from a distillery founded in 1732. The atlas treats that date as unconfirmed: UCL's Legacies of British Slavery database describes Port Mourant in 1813 as a cotton plantation, and records the enslaved people held there.

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How it connects

Region

produced-in Guyana (Demerara)

Method

technique Pot still distillation