The Kininvie distillery was built by owners William Grant & Sons around the corner from its sister distillery Balvenie in 1990 to relieve pressure on the company’s successful single malt distilleries, Glenfiddich and Balvenie, by supplying bulk Speyside single malt whisky for the company’s popular blended Scotch including Grant’s, Clan MacGregor and, later, the blended malt Monkey Shoulder. 

Kininvie uses three large wash stills and six spirit stills, and fills mostly into bourbon casks. Unusually, Kininvie’s barley is mashed and fermented at Balvenie, where it has its own dedicated mash tun and washbacks. Fermentation times are relatively long at a minimum of 75 hours and the wash is then piped to Kininvie for distillation, leading some critics to argue that Kininvie is actually just an extension of Balvenie. Kinivie’s output is around 4 million litres per year.

Despite celebrating its 30th anniversary in 2020, Kininvie has made very few official outings. The first releases of Kininvie’s single malt were bottled as Hazelwood, including the famous Janet Sheed Roberts edition that still crops up at auction. Eventually the distillery released its first single malt as Kininvie: a 23-year-old 35cl bottling of the 1990 vintage that appeared in 2013. Three more batches of 23-year-old Kininvie, a 17-year-old and a trio of 25-year-old single casks were released between 2014-2015.

Subsequently, in 2015, Kininvie featured as the key single malt in the company’s new range of House of Hazelwood blended whiskies, and since 2019 a small series of experimental distillates known as Kininvie Works have been available without much distribution other than through the distillery’s website. 

Beyond that, very little Kininvie has been seen and it seems that, like Grant’s other newish distillery Ailsa Bay, the Kininvie distillery will continue in the shadows for the time being, fulfilling its original purpose of providing good quality single malt for the Grant’s stable of blended whiskies.