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: 23 Jul 2024
By: Belfast Whiskey Week
Read: 3 min
Ref: BWW/24/332

Some of the finest whiskey moments don't happen in a tasting room — they happen on a rain-slicked cobblestone, beside a faded Victorian shopfront, with a dram warming your hand and a story warming your ears. That was the promise of Session 40: Belfast Hidden Tours – A Bespoke Whiskey & Walking Tour, one of the most beloved recurring fixtures of Belfast Whiskey Week 2024. Part duchas, part dégustation, it was a morning walk through the living seanchas of a city that has been making, blending, and arguing passionately about uisce beatha for the better part of three centuries.

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 kicked off each festival day with this signature outing, and for good reason — it set the tone for everything that followed. Participants gathered in the heart of the city and were led by guides whose enthusiasm for Belfast's whiskey heritage bordered on contagious. These weren't dry recitations of dates and distillery names; the guides brought humour, irreverence, and genuine civic pride to every stop. You got the sense they'd have told these stories whether anyone was listening or not, which is precisely why you wanted to listen.

The walk threaded through corners of Belfast that most visitors — and more than a few locals — had never properly clocked. Hidden laneways, former bonded warehouses, the ghosts of long-shuttered distilleries: all of it woven into a narrative about the men and women who built an industry from the sheugh upwards. The guides were careful to situate Belfast's whiskey story not in isolation but as part of a broader Ulster and Irish tradition — one that connects the city's industrial past to the vibrant, outward-looking scene you'll find documented on our Belfast Whiskey Map today.

The drams along the way were well-chosen and generously poured. Given the strong Bushmills thread running through BWW 2024 — you can trace it through sessions like the Bushmills History MasterClass and the Bushmills Causeway Collection MasterClass — it felt entirely right to be sipping whiskey with genuine Antrim Coast provenance while hearing about the trade routes and merchant families who once made this tír their own. The whisky landed differently out here in the open air, with a bit of Belfast September on your cheek.

The edible accompaniments were a genuine delight and spoke to the collaborative spirit that makes Belfast Whiskey Week feel like a community project rather than a commercial event. A bespoke whiskey donut from Oh Donuts and handcrafted chocolates from Daisies — whose charming city-centre restaurant also served as a gathering point — turned the walk into something genuinely multi-sensory. The chocolates in particular were a revelation: carefully matched to the spirit, they drew out notes you might have missed in a conventional tasting setting. Sláinte to the kitchen as well as the still.

At £15, Session 40 offered perhaps the best value of the entire festival. It was accessible to first-timers who'd never held a Glencairn in their lives, yet rich enough in detail to hold the attention of seasoned enthusiasts. If you missed it in 2024, keep your eyes open — this one tends to sell out early, and for very good reason. In the meantime, explore the full range of what Belfast Whiskey Week has to offer at our event collection.