Kininvie distillery

Kininvie distillery stands on the Balvenie estate in Dufftown, Moray, a Speyside single malt Scotch whisky site built in 1990. It occupies a still house only metres from the larger Balvenie distillery, sharing no mash house of its own. The distillery runs round the clock, pumping wash from Balvenie’s vessels 200 metres away through dedicated pipes. William Grant & Sons owns the site and uses its spirit mainly in blends such as Clan MacGregor. The distillery also produces limited single malt releases under its own name, beginning with a 23-year-old malt distilled in 1990. The site’s history is tied to Janet Sheed Roberts, granddaughter of William Grant. Her family home, Hazelwood, lent its name to early single malt bottlings reserved for her. In 2013 the company launched Kininvie single malt, and in 2015 revived the Hazelwood brand for a blended whisky line prominently featuring Kininvie spirit. All production is controlled by computer, yet the distillery relies on Balvenie’s mash tun and washbacks for fermentation. Visitors find a compact still house set among the Balvenie grounds, with no public visitor centre of its own. The whisky produced here is rarely seen as a single malt, most of it blended into William Grant & Sons’ whiskies. The site remains an active part of the Dufftown whisky landscape, quietly supplying spirit to some of Scotland’s best-known blends.