Belfast Hidden Tours Walking Tour – Belfast Whiskey Week 2024

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

Filed: 22 Jul 2024
By: Belfast Whiskey Week
Read: 3 min
Ref: BWW/24/652

There are few better ways to greet a festival morning than lacing up your boots, wrapping your hands around a dram, and letting the city itself become the classroom. That was precisely the promise of Session 31: Belfast Hidden Tours – A Bespoke Whiskey & Walking Tour, one of the signature daily kick-off events of Belfast Whiskey Week 2024. Beginning at Daisies in Belfast City Centre, it was a session that wore its duchas — its sense of belonging to this place — on its sleeve from the very first step.

About This Event

Belfast Hidden Tours kicks off the Festival daily, with a great opportunity to explore the City while sipping a few drams on the way. This Bespoke walk combines Belfast Hidden Tours' love of Whiskey Heritage, Belfast Histories and some great hidden places that need to be explored and not forgotten. Be prepared to listen attentively; don't miss the stories of those individuals and businesses that have built the Belfast Industry through the last few hundred years. Industrial Whiskey and Heritage is brought to life by well versed guides who have a great sense of humour and pride in their City! This walking tour will also include one of our collaborative Whiskey Donuts from "Oh Donuts" and/or bespoke Chocolates from "Daisies".

Looking Back

Belfast Hidden Tours has long understood something that tasting rooms and masterclasses sometimes miss: that whiskey is inseparable from the land, the labour, and the lives that shaped it. This bespoke walking tour leaned fully into that truth, threading drams of uisce beatha through the wynds and streets of a city that has been distilling, trading, and telling stories about whiskey for centuries. The guides — knowledgeable, sharp-witted, and clearly proud of their tír — set the tone immediately: this was seanchas made flesh, the oral tradition of Belfast's industrial and whiskey heritage delivered on the very ground where it happened.

Attendees moved through corners of the city that rarely feature on the standard tourist trail, pausing at spots where the hidden grain of Belfast's past still shows through the brickwork if you know where to look. The stories ranged from the grand sweep of industrial history to the quietly remarkable individuals — merchants, distillers, publicans — whose ambition and craft built something lasting. It was the kind of tour that makes you look at a familiar street differently afterward, and that's no small achievement at fifteen pounds a head.

The uisce beatha flowed at measured intervals, each dram chosen to complement a moment or a story rather than simply to fill a glass. For those wanting to deepen their understanding of the whiskeys being sipped, the wider BWW programme offered plenty of context — from the Bushmills History Masterclass to the Bushmills Causeway Collection Masterclass, both of which sat naturally alongside the historical threads woven through this walking session.

Two touches elevated the event from enjoyable to genuinely memorable. The collaborative whiskey doughnuts from Oh Donuts were exactly the kind of unexpected pairing that whiskey festivals should embrace more often — sweet, indulgent, and oddly well-matched to a morning dram. And the bespoke chocolates from Daisies, the charming city-centre restaurant that anchors its offering in local ingredients and Irish whiskey experiences, rounded things off with elegance. Daisies is the sort of venue that feels like a natural home for Belfast Whiskey Week: local in spirit, generous in ambition.

At £15, Session 31 was arguably the best-value gateway into BWW 2024 — and not just because of what it cost. It reminded every participant that whiskey heritage isn't preserved behind glass in a museum; it lives in the streets, the stories, and the people willing to share them. Sláinte to Belfast Hidden Tours for kicking off the festival each day with such warmth, wit, and well-earned pride.