Islay coastline

Independent Whisky Bottlers

Side Quest

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Our Story

Two friends. One bad idea. Very good whisky.

Our Side Quest started, like many good whisky stories, on Islay. We're two friends from Germany who have been drinking whisky together for decades. Over time, conversations turned into trips to the island, trips turned into cask samples, and cask samples turned into a freshly filled cask from Islay in early 2025.

That should have been the end of it.

Instead, a few months later, we were offered something far beyond what we had in mind: an absolute dream cask. A Port Charlotte from July 2001 - older, rarer, and much more ambitious than anything we had planned. So we said yes.

When we first met more than twenty years ago, we spent our evenings on side quests - the detours in games that were never the main objective but somehow became the most rewarding part. The optional path you take because it's too good to walk past. This is exactly that: a passion project that kept getting bigger, more serious, and more absurd. A proper side quest.

Side Quest is about bottling whisky we genuinely love, and doing it properly: cask strength, no chill-filtration, no added colour, and no need to pretend this was ever a sensible idea. Our first release arrives this autumn.

Serious whisky. Not so serious attitude.

Cask 177 - Bruichladdich Port Charlotte 2001

Releases

Release No. 1

Port Charlotte

25 Year Old

Single Cask · Cask Strength · Non Chill-Filtered · Natural Colour

Our first release is a 25-year-old Port Charlotte, distilled at Bruichladdich on Islay. A refill hogshead, a quarter century of time - and one of the oldest Port Charlottes ever bottled.

DistilleryPort Charlotte (Bruichladdich)
RegionIslay
Distilled5th July 2001
Cask TypeRefill Hogshead
Cask No.177
Available Autumn 2026