Belfast Hidden Tours: Walking, Whiskies & Whispers | BWW 2023

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

Filed: 15 Jul 2023
By: Belfast Whiskey Week
Read: 5 min
Ref: BWW/23/996

On a crisp Friday afternoon in October 2023, Belfast Whiskey Week sent a lucky cohort of festival-goers out into the city itself — not to a tasting room or a distillery floor, but onto the streets, laneways and long-memoried public houses of Belfast. Led by the irrepressible Fionnuala and Conor of Belfast Hidden Tours, Walking, Whiskies & Whispers was exactly what a whiskey festival should occasionally be: unhurried, story-soaked, and thoroughly on foot.

About This Event

Both Fionnuala and Conor take turns to bring our Festival Goers the chance to walk through Belfast; sampling our local whiskies, Festival Food and visiting great pubs. 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 food from “Tribal”. Timeslot: 3pm-6pm Start Time: 3pm Duration: 3hrs Venue: Multiple Locations Drinks: 5 Drams Type: Walking Tour Walking: Be Prepared to Walk around Belfast. Some of the areas & venues may not be fully accessible, please contact us @belfastwhiskeyweek on socials, or via email on marketing@belfastwhiskeyweek.com or 07773675179 (8am-8pm) to discuss. Disclaimers Please note that individual dietary requirements are not being catered for with any food at this event. Each Brand/Distillery and Collaborative Partner have agreed to our Min/Max Pour Policy. Please Respect this, and enjoy your festival responsibly. Festival Participants who are deemed to be too inebriated, or are not respecting themselves, will not be permitted into events and venues. ALL Hosts/Ushers/Collaborators and Venue Staff have the right to refuse participants without question and recourse. Please Drink Responsibly. All events are only available to those 18 years old and over. Do not purchase tickets if you are under the age of 18. Be prepared to produce ID if required. Venue staff & ushers may ask you to provide ID when showing your valid tickets. You may be refused enter to events if you can’t prove your age. Some venues may change, if they do, you will be notified. All events are subject to changes out of the control of the festival organisers. Any issues, please contact us @belfastwhiskeyweek on socials, or via email on marketing@belfastwhiskeyweek.com or 07773675179 (8am-8pm) to discuss. NO Refunds will be given. Please only buy tickets if you are prepared to attend the event. Tickets are transferable. If you are going to transfer tickets please email, marketing@belfastwhiskeyweek.com

Looking Back

There is a word in Irish — duchas — that gestures at something like inherited belonging, a deep-rooted sense of place and people. It is not a word you would typically reach for to describe a whiskey event, and yet it felt apt here. From the 3pm start, Fionnuala and Conor wore their knowledge of Belfast lightly but carried it with obvious pride, threading the group through corners of the city that even long-time residents might pass without a second glance. The seanchas — the oral tradition, the stories passed down — was very much alive in how they spoke about the individuals, the industries, and the institutions that built Belfast's whiskey heritage across the last few hundred years. This was not a lecture. It was a conversation between the city and the people walking through it.

Five drams punctuated the three hours, each pour timed to a location or a story, so that the whiskey and the history arrived together and made sense of one another. That pairing of place and uisce beatha gave the afternoon a cumulative warmth — a sláinte raised not just to the dram in hand but to the men and women whose labour and imagination built the industry these glasses represent. Belfast Hidden Tours brings exactly this kind of contextual intelligence to their work; they understand that whiskey is never just a drink, it is a document of a tír, a record of the people who shaped it.

The food element deserves its own mention. A collaborative whiskey donut from Oh Donuts and bespoke bites from Tribal arrived at just the right moment in the walk, when feet were earning their keep and the afternoon light was beginning to soften. These were not afterthoughts — they were genuinely considered pairings, the kind that remind you that eating well and drinking well are part of the same conversation. For those who wanted more walking-tour experiences across the festival, the Belfast Walking Tours: Belfast's Public Houses & Art Trail offered a complementary route through the city's licensed heritage, while Walking With Marty brought its own brand of Irish whiskey scholarship to the streets.

What set this particular tour apart from a standard tasting was the human scale of it — the fact that you were moving through the city rather than sitting in it, that the sheugh-and-cobblestone reality of Belfast was underfoot the whole time. Fionnuala and Conor are gifted communicators with a genuine sense of humour and, more importantly, a genuine love of what they do. That showed in every stop, every story, every well-placed pause before delivering the punchline of a two-hundred-year-old piece of civic gossip. The group arrived back three hours later with five good drams inside them, a head full of stories, and a slightly altered relationship with a city they thought they already knew. If you want to explore Belfast's whiskey geography further, the Belfast Whiskey Map is a fine place to continue that journey at your own pace.

Belfast Hidden Tours runs repeat sessions of this walk through the festival programme, and the demand for tickets reflects what anyone who attended on this particular Friday afternoon already knows: there is something irreplaceable about learning a city through its whiskey, and nobody does it with more warmth or wit than Fionnuala and Conor.