Wooden Stills of Guyana BY DAVIN DEKERGOMMEAUX Davin stated his wide wide world of his travels were headed for the Rums of Guyana. We paused and replied: Rum? Yes, emphatically, rum!
Asked if stills really affect flavour, Sharon Sue-Hang-Baksh responds instantly, “It’s massive.” She’s in Fredericton leading an El Dorado rum dinner at the New Brunswick Spirits Festival. As chief blender for Guyana’s Diamond Distillers, also known as Demerara Distillers Ltd (DDL), Sue-Hang should know. From just a single wash, Diamond produces dozens of rums, differing solely in how they are distilled. DDL, you see, has the wildest assortment of stills you could imagine. Better than that, for exploring minds they bottle three “single-still” rums on their El Dorado label. For easy comparison, each is aged twelve years, and bottled in 40% and cask-strength versions. Tasted head-to-head they showcase how radically stills do shape the final flavour. Sue-Hang was convincing. Next morning, dozens of festival-goers lined up to purchase her rums at a nearby liquor store. And me? Soon, I was aboard a plane for Georgetown, Guyana to meet Diamond’s operations manager, Darryl Manichand, and see his wonderfully bizarre stills, in action. Among these was the world’s last working wooden Coffey still – a leaky relic built in 1880, that the owners decline to re-seal for fear of changing its flavours. Named “Enmore,” for the estate where
it originated, its two towering square columns, red paint chipped and discoloured by time, reminded whisky writer Dave Broom of a giant filing cabinet. Diamond acquired the Enmore still in 2000. Beyond being an excellent introduction to the flavour signatures of stills, Enmore rum is a treat for the whisky lover. Clearly rum, but with a strong barrel-oak backbone, hints of blackstrap, toffee, brisk peppers, coconut, high estery tones, sweet peaches, and fading hot spices. It has good weight and shows remarkable complexity before segueing into a long spicy finish. Oh, glory! Enmore isn’t the only marvel at Diamond, though. As changing world economies gradually forced Guyana’s forty-four distilleries to close, Diamond bought their stills, relocating them to Georgetown where they continue producing “marques” that otherwise would have been lost. Another such wonder is an 18th-century wooden “pot” still from the “Versailles,” sugar estate. It was common, in early Guyana for sugar plantations to distil the sugar-rich residues from making molasses. Uniquely, workers colour the spirit from the Versailles still with spirit caramel before filling it into oak barrels, leading to a remarkably dark final product. Staff in the distillery’s tasting room kept returning to the
Photo Credit: Matt Pietrek
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the whisky explorer magazine
WINTER 2024
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