It’s a Rum World is a 1973 documentary film showing some of the stages of rum production by United Rum Merchants (1946-2010). The film opens a colonial-era reenactment of a man delivering a bottle of rum to British landowners. The film then cuts to the coast of Jamaica (01:56). A man pushes a raft down a river to the sea. Three Jamaican men play instruments and sing a song about rum and coconut water (02:50). The proprietor of the Little Pub makes rum cocktails (03:45). There is a shot of a sugar plantation. (04:20) Harvested sugarcane is moved from piles at a rum factory. The film shows the distillery’s pot stills and a man stirring a glass of Lemon Hart rum. Next, the film takes viewers to Guyana (05:23), with shots of houses on stilts and an aerial view of the Uitvlugt Distillery and neighboring demerara sugar plantation. A man drives a tractor plowing a field to prepare it for planting sugarcane. 06:25 Men bury sugarcane shoots in the ground (06:25). A plane dusts the field with insecticide. Ripe demerara sugar blows in the wind. Men set fire to the sugarcane fields to burn off the leaves. Afterward, men use machetes to cut the cane (07:43), and then they throw the cane onto boats in the irrigation canals. Several plantation managers discuss the harvest schedule to accommodate viewing an upcoming international cricket match. At a sugar processing plant (08:58), the sugarcane is weighed, and the cutters are paid. The sugarcane is run through milling machines where it is crushed, and the pulp sent to be used as fuel. The liquid sugarcane mixture sits in evaporating vats and then is turned into molasses (10:04). In a lab at Uitvlugt, a chemist makes a yeast wash (11:06). Steam-heated stills distill the rum. Another chemist tests the rum in a lab. Men fill oak casks with the distilled spirit (13:07), which is then taken to the docks for shipping. Casks are hoisted by crane onto shipping barges. At United Rum Merchants’ factory in Dumbarton, Scotland (14:16), viewers see a warehouse packed with casks of maturing rum. A man opens a cask and uses a flange to sample the rum for final quality control. Another man puts a bottle of the sample on a shelve. United Rum’s Chief Blender smells the various samples to decide which rums to blend together (15:50). A man puts a hose into a cask to pump the rum to a massive blending vat. The film then shows the bottling process of United Rum’s branded rums. Bottles move along conveyer belts; a woman watches the bottles, checking the color of the rum. Labels are put on the bottles and then the bottles are boxed for shipping. A white blend named Santigo is packaged. The film concludes with a modern-day reenactment of a man brining a bottle of rum to several wealthy men at an estate (18:20), and shots of people drinking the various brands of United Rum Merchants’ rum (including people on the back of a boat and others in a British pub).

Uitvlugt is a village in Guyana, based on the west bank of the Demerara River, however the name is Dutch. Back in the 17th century most sugar cane plantations produced their own rum. The Dutch-owned Uitvlugt Distillery was established around 1750, housing double wooden pot stills which produced a heavy style rum.

However, in 1975 the government began privatizing sugar plantations and distilleries, amalgamating them into one large distillery owned by the Guyana Liquor Corporation, and this sadly saw the close of Uitvglut in 2000. The only remaining distillery in Guyana is the acclaimed Diamond Distillery, which acquired the stills from Uitvlugt.

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