4 Decades of Irish Whiskey Tasting | Belfast Whiskey Week 2024

Name: Belfast Whiskey Week 2026
Start: 2026-07-24
End: 2026-08-01
Location: Belfast

Filed: 20 Jul 2024
By: Belfast Whiskey Week
Read: 3 min
Ref: BWW/24/308

Some sessions ask questions. Session 16 of Belfast Whiskey Week 2024 asked one of the most important questions the festival has ever put to a glass: has Irish whiskey actually been getting better? Held in what can only be described as the most extraordinary room dedicated to Irish whiskey anywhere in the world, this straight whiskey tasting invited guests to travel through four decades of uisce beatha — from the 1980s right up to the newest releases — and draw their own conclusions.

About This Event

Trying Irish Whiskey from the 1980s, 90's, 00's and newly released whiskies is a great way to gauge the future of the Irish Whiskey scene. We get the opportunity to spend time in the World's most extravagant and opulent room dedicated to Irish Whiskey while tasting whiskies that let us reflect and question the reason why we have a festival here in Belfast at all....

Looking Back

There is a particular kind of seanchas that belongs to whiskey — the oral history carried not in words but in flavour, in the faint ghost of a different era's distilling philosophy sitting on your tongue. That was precisely what Session 16 offered its attendees. Four decades, four distinct chapters in Irish whiskey's story, poured side by side for reflection and honest comparison. The 1980s expressions arrived like old acquaintances — sometimes rougher around the edges, sometimes startlingly elegant, always carrying the weight of a time when Irish whiskey was a category fighting for its survival on the world stage.

Moving through the 1990s and into the 2000s, the room — already alive with quiet concentration and animated conversation — began to feel the arc of the story. The whiskeys from those middle decades spoke of an industry finding its footing again, cautious and capable in equal measure. Then the newer releases landed, and with them came the real crux of the evening's debate: have we arrived somewhere better, or have we simply arrived somewhere different? There were no wrong answers here, only well-considered ones, and the quality of the conversation matched the quality of what was in the glass.

The venue itself deserves mention. Friend at Hand — home to what is genuinely among the most opulent and thoughtfully curated collections of Irish whiskey you will find under one roof — provided a setting that elevated every pour. Tasting whiskey of this age and significance in a room that treats the category with such evident reverence felt entirely right. It gave the evening a gravity without ever making it feel heavy. If you have not yet explored the broader Belfast Whiskey Map to find your way to corners of the city where Irish whiskey is celebrated like this, it is well worth your time.

For those who came to BWW2024 with a particular interest in Irish whiskey heritage and provenance, Session 16 sat alongside some of the festival's most compelling deep-dive experiences. The Bushmills History MasterClass offered a different but complementary lens on the long arc of Ulster distilling, while the Bushmills Causeway Collection MasterClass brought that history right up to the present day. Together, these sessions formed something like a curriculum — the kind of learning you carry home not in notes but in memory and understanding.

The real gift of an evening like this is the way it reframes why Belfast Whiskey Week exists at all. Not simply to celebrate what Irish whiskey is now, but to honour what it was, to understand the distance travelled, and to look honestly at where it might be going. Sláinte to everyone who raised a glass that night — and to the difficult, delicious questions that remain gloriously unanswered.