2020

That's Dram Good: The all-encompassing whiskey festival — a 2020 review

Whiskey blog That's Dram Good covers Belfast Whiskey Week's brave 2020 pivot to an online festival format during the pandemic, with an honest look at the costs and the craft.

Irish whiskey blog That's Dram Good has published one of the most genuinely useful long-form pieces written about Belfast Whiskey Week's pandemic-era 2020 edition — a deep dive into what it actually took to pivot a city-wide festival into an online experience without losing what made it Belfast.

Filed: 01 Jul 2020
By: Belfast Whiskey Week
Read: 1 min

The blog's writer captures the choice the festival faced: with Covid-19 restrictions making a physical festival impossible, the team made what the piece describes as a "brave move" to continue Belfast Whiskey Week as an online festival. The instinct from outside might be that going online would be easier or cheaper. The piece is honest about why the opposite was true.

"Costs have shot up through the roof with the introduction of 1,000 bespoke tasting boxes, 1,300 glasses, 7,500 miniature bottles, labels, packaging, postage, labour etc etc etc......!! A physical festival would indeed be easier and more efficient to run."

That honesty is what makes the piece worth reading. Behind the tasting boxes that landed on doorsteps in Australia, Argentina and across Europe were thousands of miniature decants, labels printed at small batch, glasses sourced, packaging designed, postage paid. The festival shipped what was effectively a piece of Belfast to people on other continents.

The writer is candid about pricing too — some tastings priced around £50, others £200+ for the rarer pours — and explains the maths in a way that respects the reader. This wasn't a cash grab; it was a serious operation with serious costs, run by a small team with a love for what they were doing.

What comes through, beyond the logistics, is the writer's clear affection for the festival and the people behind it. The piece traces a personal history of Belfast whiskey discovery — Bittles, the Duke of York, the Harp Bar, and a late-night welcome at the Friend at Hand back in 2017 that left a lasting impression. The Belfast whiskey scene didn't just attract a festival; it produced one out of its own community.

The piece closes with a recommendation to book in fast before the 2020 edition kicked off on 25 July — an artefact, now, of a strange year, and a reminder of how the festival adapted without losing its identity.

Read the full review: That's Dram Good — Belfast Whiskey Week: The all-encompassing whiskey festival