As with many things, the why is frequently makes the what much more interesting. Similar to Whiskey 202: Bourbon, Kentucky and corn, Scotch also deserves a look at the background of what's being distilled. History won't provide an exact roadmap but a few clues can help us find connections. Having the running series on American and Scotch whiskies mirror each other is nice too. For a quick refresher, Scotch is largely distilled from malted barley. Single malts, or any 'malt whisky,' is distilled from 100% malted barley. Bourbon, on the other hand, is distilled from mostly corn.
Compared to Bourbon (at least in part an outgrowth of welcomed immigration and land grants requiring the production of corn), the beginnings of Scotch production appear to be even more natural and drawn out. For hundreds of years, or longer, the Scots have primarily grown two grains, barley and oats. Most crops don't fare well where it's frequently cloudy, wet and cold like Scotland, but these two do well.
Malting, a multistep process that germinates (to a desired extent) a grain through soaking and drying a grain, goes back to the ancient world. One prominent use of course is beer (from water, barley, yeast and hops!), something else humans have been making in one form or another for a long long time. The Scots would've known how to do this and it would help them in distilling.
After monks in Ireland, maybe as far back as 1000, started distilling an early version of what we now call 'whiskey,' it's not surprising that it would spread to the rest of the British isles. Monks in the Middle Ages both kept and disseminated information that they'd learned, though it may have been very slow in getting around. Fascinatingly enough, it sounds like the process for distilling spirits originally developed from the making of perfumes on mainland Europe. The spirit they were distilling that long ago would be unrecognizable to us today, as it would've been a very inexactly made as well as un-aged and flavored with herbs.
By the late Middle Ages, if we combine everything we know so far, Scots were growing barley and knew how to malt it and make beer. Then the how-to of distilling spread. The first record of Scots and aqua vitae dates to 1494, leading us to believe the knowledge transfer occurred earlier in the 15th century. It can't be in any way shocking they started distilling the barley already around. I can also tell you first hand how nicely a dram goes with the Scottish weather, so it's also not surprising it was quickly popular. Often simply called 'malt,' the spirit was widespread enough to draw taxation beginning in 1644. This led to a huge rise in illegal whisky production, primarily in the Highlands, that grew and grew. Eventually the 1823 Excise Act regulated everything and put the onus on landowners to end any remaining illicit industry. The first licensed malt whisky distillery, Glenlivet, opened the next year and was quickly followed by a number of others.
Don't think I've forgotten about peat, a piece distinctly Scottish when it comes to whiskey. Most peoples use a different type of fuel, like wood, when building a fire for malting or otherwise. The Scots traditionally used peat fires for drying the barley to halt germination (and other things). Peat is decaying organic matter in the ground and looks like dirt and grass or moss, and isn't far from it. Scotland is full of peat-bogs, a form of wetland. It turns out peat is the most efficient type of carbon sink on the planet, where carbon is naturally stored on Earth instead of escaping into the atmosphere. While peatlands only cover 2-3% of the world's land surface, they contain 30+% of the world's stored carbon, more than the sum of the world's forests or any other vegetation. Peat does regenerate, though exceptionally slowly, and is considered neither a fossil fuel or a renewable resource. At some point the Scots starting using it as a fuel source. When used in malting, as is still done today for some Scotch whiskies (notably from Islay but not limited to there) it imparts smoky, earthy, even gritty flavors to the malt and its resulting spirit. This may sound horrible but I promise it can actually be entirely lovely, though in my experience it took some time to appreciate it.
More than anything the early development of what makes Scotch whisky comes from the climate and land of Scotland. They were already growing barley because it fits the weather and seasons there. The knowledge of malting and beer making has been around forever. They use abundant peat as a fuel for fires, including malting, literally taking the earth from the ground to do so. And when the Scots learned how to distill, a gift that started (in that part of the world anyway) with Irish monks, things really took off. This led to regulation of the booming industry and giving us the product we have today.
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