Diamond 2003

The sugar production in this area has started already around the year 1658 and almost every estate with plantation had also a small distillery on its premises. The Diamond plantation was founded on the east side of the Demerara river around 1670. The demand for this location has been so high that there were over 300 estates in Guyana around 1780 producing their own rum from the molasses. Unfortunately, the access to obtain any type of metals to build the stills was very difficult at that time and therefore the settlers tried to find any suitable material to construct the “pot still“ type distillation equipment. They have managed to find the solution in the local Greenheart wood. This type of wood is extremely durable, strong and is not prone to decay in the wet conditions. That is why so many estates used this wood to construct their distillation stills. To distinguish from the common “pot still“ they named these partly wooden distillation stills as “vat stills“.

Towards the end of the 18th century, the estates producing sugar and rum have slowly started to merge together due to the significant fluctuation of the sugar prices and the new tax system. This caused that in 1960, only eight distilleries remained open in Guyana. From 1974, the government gradually privatized the sugar plantations and distilleries to create one large company called Guyana Liquor Corporation (today called Demerara Distillers Ltd. or DDL for short) with only one functional distillery – Diamond. This process has finished by the closing of Uitvlugt distillery in 1999.

The gradual merging of the estates has caused that the distillation stills from the closed down distilleries were moved into the ones that remained open and running. And thanks to this, the Diamond distillery proudly owns two unique wooden “vat stills“ (Port Mourant and Versailles). They also acquired a rare wooden Coffey continuous still (made from the Greenheart wood) referred to as “Enmore“ or “EHP“ named after Edward Henry Porter, the owner of the original estate that operated this still.

The Diamond distillery currently owns these types of stills used for their rum production:

Port Mourant (wooden vat, *1732), Enmore/EHP (wooden Coffey, *1880), Versailles (wooden vat, *1890), Savalle #1 (metal Savalle, *1921), Diamond #1, Diamond #2 (metal Coffey, *1950), Diamond High Ester (metal double retort, *1950s), Savalle #2 (metal Savalle, *1980), Diamond #3 (metal Coffey, *2011), Multi-pressure Rectification Still “MPRS“ (metal multicolumn, *2011).

The Diamond distillery can produce up to 24 different marks of rums nowadays, all thanks to this wide range of the distillation stills. The distillery uses up to 200 – 220 tons of molasses a day which in total can produce circa 55.000 liters of pure alcohol daily and up to 20 million liters of pure alcohol a year. About 40 % of this volume is used for their own products and the remaining 60 % is sold to the partners. The Diamond distillery has currently around 90.000 barrels (mostly ex-bourbon) and is planning to increase their ageing stock up to 130.000 barrels.  You would hardly find another distillery around the globe, that could match the history, variety of the equipment, and the rum quality of this titan from the Demerara River shores. But it was mainly the uniqueness of this Single Cask that has convinced us that Diamond has to be part of our collection so we can offer you to savour the taste of this special piece from Guyana.