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: 27 Jul 2024
By: Belfast Whiskey Week
Read: 3 min
Ref: BWW/24/428

There are few better ways to greet a festival morning than lacing up your boots, raising a dram to the Belfast skyline, and letting a great storyteller lead you somewhere unexpected. That's exactly what Belfast Hidden Tours delivered when they kicked off Belfast Whiskey Week 2024 with their bespoke Whiskey & Walking Tour — a daily ritual that blended the city's industrial uisce beatha heritage with laneways, lore, and more than a little good humour.

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

From the first step, this was an event that understood something fundamental: whiskey is never really just about the liquid in the glass. It's about place, about the people who built something from the ground up, about the sheugh-side stories that never quite made it into the official histories. Belfast Hidden Tours has always known this, and their BWW 2024 walking tour was a masterclass in bringing that duchas — that sense of inherited belonging — to the surface. Guides led small groups through corners of the city that many visitors, and indeed many locals, had simply walked past without a second glance.

The seanchas came thick and fast. Attendees heard about the individuals and enterprises that shaped Belfast's whiskey industry across centuries — a story of ambition, collapse, revival, and remarkable resilience. The guides wore their knowledge lightly, which is the hardest thing to do; there was genuine wit threaded through the history, and a palpable pride in the tír that never tipped into sentimentality. By the time each stop was reached, the city felt a little more legible, a little more alive.

The drams along the way kept spirits warm and conversations flowing — and if you're curious how Belfast's whiskey story continues today, our Whiskey Map is a good place to follow the thread beyond the tour route. The walking experience was also nicely grounded in the here and now: a collaborative whiskey donut from Oh Donuts and bespoke chocolates from Daisies — the charming city-centre restaurant that served as a base — gave the whole thing a sense of occasion without unnecessary fuss. Pairing good chocolate with a well-chosen dram is, it turns out, a very sound idea.

For those who wanted to go deeper into the liquid heritage touched upon during the walk, the wider festival offered rich context. Sessions exploring Bushmills' long history and the Causeway Collection sat naturally alongside what the tour had lit up in the imagination — names and places that had just been given new weight suddenly had drams to match. At £15, this was one of the festival's most quietly generous offerings: modest in price, generous in everything else.

Sláinte to Belfast Hidden Tours for understanding that the best way to open a whiskey festival is not in a tasting room, but out on the streets of the city itself — boots on the cobbles, stories in the air, and a dram to mark the going.