A distillery inside a bottling plant
A bottling plant opened at Leven, Fife, in 1973, and bottling began that September.1,3,6 In 2005 added a blending and filtration space there for new products.
Peated
Leven Distillery is a small experimental distillery inside the Leven bottling plant that became fully working in 2013.1,2,3 Diageo began building a development area there in 2005 to test ideas it could scale up at its larger plants.1,2,4 Whisky Magazine judged in 2022 that it was unlikely ever to yield a whisky of its own.4,5
It has 1 wash still for the first distillation and 1 spirit still for the second, each holding 1,000 litres.1 The stills have swappable heads in onion, ball and lampglass shapes that can mimic a variety of spirit profiles.4 Steam heats the stills, and shell and tube condensers turn the vapour back into spirit.2 It ferments in 4 temperature-controlled stainless steel washbacks, the tanks where sugary water from the mash turns into a beer.2,4 It uses town water and can make 0.25 million litres of alcohol a year.1,2 By 2022 its mash tun could switch between semi-lauter and mash converter styles of mashing, and it also had a column still for grain whisky.4
In 2019 ScotchWhisky.com reported that trials started at bench scale and could grow to 500 kg cereal batches.7 Diageo ran most of its whisky experiments here, and manager Richard Cowley said the trials let it lay down casks for its blenders.7 In 2022 Cowley said work at Leven on bringing rye back into Scotch shaped full-scale processes later run at Diageo’s main distilleries.4,5
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