AS a scion of the man who created what is credited as the first blended Scotch, you might think it was preordained Alex Bruce would build a career in the whisky industry.

But being the great-grandson of James Usher, the man who brought the Ushers OVG (Old Vatted Glenlivet) blend into the world in the 1850s, did not propel the managing director of independent bottler Adelphi Distillery to a plum role at the top of the trade.

Indeed, Mr Bruce would serve a long and valuable apprenticeship as a wine and spirits merchant before devoting himself full-time to making and selling Scotland’s national drink.

Now a whisky maker in his own right – Adelphi launched the Ardnamurchan Distillery at Glenbeg in the West Highlands in 2014 – Mr Bruce found himself “hooked” by the industry in the early 1990s.

The business and languages degree he achieved at Napier University, included a rewarding placement with Remy Martin, the esteemed Cognac maker.

But it wasn’t a great time for Scotch. The whisky industry was only just emerging from a cyclical downturn of over-supply in the early 1990s, and full-time sales and marketing roles were hard to come by. “The advice I got was just to get into the industry anyhow,” Mr Bruce said. “That’s why I ended up working predominantly for a wine merchant, who also did spirits. It just went from there really.”

As it transpired, Mr Bruce could scarcely have picked a better merchant to earn his stripes with. The business in question was the esteemed Justerini & Brooks, creator of the famous J&B Rare blended whisky. During his time there the London merchant became part of the world’s biggest drinks firm. when the “whole portfolio of what had been United Distiller’s and IDV’s whiskies suddenly appeared in our books, which was great.”

Mr Bruce continued to work for Justerini & Brooks as a rep on the west coast of Scotland, covering a patch stretching from the far north to Dumfriesshire. It meant he had a box seat as consumer interest in Scottish food and drink began to grow, and recalls the time being hugely educational.

From Justerini & Brooks he moved to Friarwood, another London-based merchant which asked him to set up a branch in Edinburgh in 2002. It was while at Friarwood that he was approached to run Adelphi in 2004.

“It was completely out of the blue and not what I was expecting,” Mr Bruce laughs. “I took the plunge and never looked back, it’s been fantastic.

“There were only two of us at that point – two of us and a stock of roughly four casks and a couple of hundred bottles.”

Adelphi was founded as an independent Scotch whisky bottler in 1992 by Jamie Walker, great-grandson of Archibald Walker who set up the original Adelphi Distillery in Glasgow in the 19th century. It was sold to Keith Falconer and Donald Houston in 2002.

While Adelphi built its reputation on selecting very rare casks of single malt whiskies, bottling them, and releasing them under its own labels, it is now taking its first steps as a distiller on the Ardnamurchan peninsula.

There were some early teething problems, largely because of the owners’ wish to be as environmentally friendly as possible.

Having set out to become the first Scotch distiller to be fuelled by locally sourced renewable energy, Mr Bruce notes there was some difficulty getting to grips with the biomass steam boiler, but he said that “in the long term it was the right thing to do”.

Noting that much of the barley used in the whisky making is grown on a farm next to Adelphi in Fife, he added: “The draff is taken away to feed the cattle – it keeps everything on the peninsula.”

Safe in the knowledge that the distillery was operating as it should, Mr Bruce said production was ramped up distillery earlier this year. The intention is then to double production next year.

“The spirit is maturing incredibly well and we’re really excited about the future,” Mr Bruce said.

While the distiller will technically be entitled to launch a whisky next year, Mr Bruce said he was unable to specific when its first “fully fledged” single malt will be released. Adelphi will, however, to introduce an Ardnamurchan spirit next month, underlining the owners’ confidence in their product.

“We’re going to bottle about 2,500 bottles this year, which are already looking like they are going to have to go on allocation because of the demand,” Mr Bruce said.

Adelphi’s relentless thirst to innovate recently led it to become involved in Fusions, a pioneering brand that blends high quality single malts from Scotland with whiskies from around the world. So far the project has involved whiskies from Japan and India, with drams from other countries expected to follow soon.

“Adelphi’s ethos is very much bottling something that we enjoy drinking ourselves, and if we enjoy it then hopefully other people will too,” Mr Bruce said.

“And that is very much including our own first release from Ardnamurchan. It was a fascinating time when we started to blend a few casks together in August to see how it was looking. It was just really, really interesting.”