rum, demerara , is rum distilled in Guyana, a small country between Venezuela and Suriname on the Caribbean coast of South America but associated with the Caribbean due to its history as a Dutch and English colony. See Caribbean. Distilled from fermented molasses, the rum is heavy-bodied and rich, with significant molasses character and a moderate degree of fermentation flavors (funk). See molasses. Production follows fermentation in large vats, followed by distillation to varying proofs using a diverse variety of stills. Most demerara rum for export is aged in well-charred, used bourbon barrels, which adds moderate wood/vanillin and char flavors to the flavor profile. Some demerara rum is stripped of color (and some flavor) for bottling as clear rum, but most is left brown and tweaked with caramel color for consistency. Younger blended demerara rums are often heavily darkened with caramel to produce black rums, some of which are bottled as 151-proof rum (particularly prized in tiki drinks) or blended into a navy rum (useful in certain punches). See rum, navy.
Rum production on sugar plantations in the Demerara colonies dates to the 1650s, and sugar production remains a primary industry in Guyana today. From the mid-1800s, Guyana supplied much of the rum for the English navy. By the eighteenth century, Guyana had hundreds of plantation distilleries, but during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, these distilleries gradually consolidated; as they consolidated, they moved toward greater production efficiencies and became the first distillers in the British Caribbean to embrace column distillation and making rum from molasses and water only, rather than the mixture of skimmings, molasses, and dunder that had been the consensus model in the region. See rum. As of 1998, all demerara rum is produced by the government-owned Demerara Distillers Ltd (DDL) at a lone distillery: Diamond Estate.
DDL claims to produce twenty different styles of rum at Diamond, employing nine different stills, of both pot- and continuous-still designs. See still, pot and still, continuous. Diamond’s are among the oldest operating stills in the world, having been relocated and maintained in service from other facilities. At least two of the stills are made of wood.
Demerara rum is either bottled in-house under the El Dorado brand, which includes several age-statement bottlings, or is exported—as it has been for centuries—for use by blenders. The Wood’s, Lamb’s, and Lemon Hart brands are longstanding examples of blender rum that is overtly based on demerara rum.
Barty-King, Hugh, and Anton Massel. Rum Yesterday and Today. London: Heinemann, 1983.
Demerara Distillers Ltd. http://demeraradistillers.com (accessed April 1, 2021).
By: Martin Doudoroff