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Skeldon
Region
Guyana
Status
Closed
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The Skeldon sugar estate is located to the east of the Berbice river in Guyana and was founded in the early 19th century by William Ross, and was named for his ancestral home in the Ayrshire region of Scotland.
The estate is today owned by the Guyana Sugar Corporation Inc (GuySuCo), however the distillery on the site has been closed since 1960 after rationalisation efforts by its owners at the time, Booker Brothers, McConnell & Co Ltd.
In its years of operation, rum from the Skeldon estate was sold in barrels bearing the SWR marque (an acronym for Sir William Ross). Despite its closure, SWR rums continued to be produced, first at Uitvlugt distillery and now at Diamond by Demerara Distillers Ltd (DDL). Unlike several of the other historic marques produced there, it is no longer made on the original Skeldon still which is believed to have been scrapped along with the distillery. Instead it is made on the versatile Uitvlugt four-column Savalle.
SWR is a fairly rare marque and there are only a handful of official releases. The earliest were bottled in 2005 in the first batch of DDL releases produced for distribution by Velier SpA in Italy, both of which are now legendary rums. It was thirteen years before the name reappeared, this time as part of the Rare Collection series of single marque rums from DDL's flagship El Dorado brand.