Whiskey Chats Podcast: A walk around Titanic Distillers during Belfast Whiskey Week 2025

"We met up with Head Distiller Damien and we went for a stroll and a chat around the distillery building, finding out more about the Titanic Distillery project. It is an amazing building, the old pumphouse of the dry dock where the fateful Titanic was actually built. Huge history, huge stories, huge legacy. I highly recommend a visit if you're at a loose end in Belfast."

Titanic Distillers — Belfast's first working whiskey distillery in almost 90 years — opened to the public in the restored pumphouse at Thompson Dock, the same dock where the original Titanic was last on dry ground before her maiden voyage. The site itself does extraordinary storytelling work before anyone's poured a dram.

The conversation captures both the practical reality of running a distillery in a heritage building and the wider significance of what Titanic Distillers represents for Belfast. The city's distilling heritage was massive in the 19th century — by the early 1800s, in terms of volume alone, Belfast had outstripped both Cork and Dublin as Ireland's largest distilling centre. Then it disappeared. Titanic Distillers is part of putting it back.

For festival attendees, the Titanic Distillers events during Belfast Whiskey Week — including A Night with Titanic Distillers and the Titanic Distillery Day — have become some of the most distinctive experiences on the programme. The combination of working distillery, dry-dock history, and the floating mezzanine distillery floor offers something genuinely unique among Irish whiskey distillery visits.

Whiskey Chats podcasts work especially well as documentation of festival weekends like this one — the format captures the actual atmosphere of being there, the unhurried walking pace, and the genuine conversations between people who know what they're talking about. It's the kind of audio that brings a place to life for listeners who couldn't make it in person.

Laurie O'Dwyer's coverage across Belfast Whiskey Week 2025 — three episodes from the same festival — represents one of the most substantial audio archives of any single year of the festival.

Listen to the full episode: Whiskey Chats — My Titanic Distillery Chat with Damien