WHISKY entrepreneur Billy Walker has netted almost £100m for his family after selling the BenRiach Distillery business, which he launched with an investment of less than £1m.

Jack Daniel’s owner Brown-Forman has agreed to buy the BenRiach Distillery Company for £285 million, in a deal that values the Walker family’s stake in the firm at £95m.

“The price was fantastic, the price is astonishing,” said Mr Walker, who developed the malt whisky business after buying the mothballed BenRiach distillery on Speyside in 2002.

The distillery cost around £5m but Mr Walker said he and two partners from South Africa invested just £1.2m of their own funds in total in the firm, which restarted production from BenRiach in 2004.

They went on to build a business that generated annual sales of more than £40m after using the profits made by BenRiach to help breathe new life into the GlenDronach and Glenglassaugh distilleries in Aberdeenshire.

“The acquisition of these super premium brands will allow Brown-Forman to re-enter one of our industry’s most exciting and consistent growth segments, Single Malt Scotch Whisky,” said Brown-Forman chief executive Paul Varga.

A series of distillers have been acquired in recent years by foreign corporations that are looking to capitalise on a boom in demand for Scotch around the world.

Exports of the kind of single malts that BenRiach Distillery Company produces have surged as globalisation has resulted in the emergence of a new class of affluent consumers in areas such as Asia. These drink Scotch to show they have arrived.

Kentucky-based Brown-Forman beat off competition from a number of other firms to buy BenRiach.

Mr Walker, 71, said: “We’ve been courted by a number of companies over the last two years and unquestionably the one that fitted best for us was Brown-Forman because they don’t have a presence in the industry and they gave us all the necessary assurances nobody anywhere in the team would be disadvantaged by the change of ownership.”

In addition to the three distilleries BenRiach has a bottling plant and head office in Edinburgh. It has 165 employees, including 55 seasonal and casual workers.

Mr Walker will remain with the business, which he believes should continue to achieve strong growth under Brown-Forman. The US giant does business around the world and has huge marketing muscle.

“We are very confident that Brown-Forman will take The GlenDronach, BenRiach, and Glenglassaugh brands to the next level and fulfill their full potential, and prove to be worthy custodians of these historic distilleries,” said the industry veteran.

Mr Walker said he was a Rangers fan to the core of his heart. Asked if he might use some of the proceeds of the blockbuster takeover to invest in the football club he said: “It’s unlikely,” adding: “I haven’t really thought about it.”

BenRiach’s success has been based on spotting the growth potential of the single malt market and finding the right way to target it.

“We can say truthfully that we saw that the single malt was going to be a big player in the whisky sector,” said Mr Walker. He noted: “We focused on the premium end of the single malt market, we focused on going through routes to market that we were familiar with and were more in line with the private, independent, importer-distributor networks than the mass market.”

A former operations director with Burn Stewart Distillers, Mr Walker bought the BenRiach distillery near Elgin from Pernod Ricard with South Africans Geoff Bell and Wayne Keiswetter. The team acquired stocks of whisky dating from 1965.

Mr Walker became master blender.

BenRiach bought the Glendronach distillery in Huntly from Pernod Ricard in 2008.

It bought Glenglassaugh by Portsoy from a Dutch firm in 2013.

The prices of the deals were not disclosed.

Mr Walker said Royal Bank of Scotland had been amazingly helpful in the last five years..

Brown-Forman expects the acquisition of BenRiach to complete in June. It had a minority stake in Glenmorangie which it sold when that business was bought by Moet Hennessy in 2005.

Companies House records show Mr Walker owns around 20 per cent of the shares in Benriach Distillery Company. Other family members have 13 per cent in total.

Mr Walker netted around £500,000 from the sale of his stake in Burn Stewart in 2002, when the firm was bought by Trinidad-based CL Financial.

The son of a shipyard blacksmith, Mr Walker studied chemistry at Glasgow University.

He entered the whisky industry at the age of 26, as a distillery chemist at Inver House, when the firm was owned by Canada's Hiram Walker.