Belfast Hidden Tours: Whiskey Heritage Session | BWW 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/24/564

On the evening of 22nd July 2024, the Music Hall at The Deer's Head became the beating heart of Belfast Whiskey Week, drawing together lovers of the uisce beatha, traditional music, and the deep seanchas of this city's remarkable whiskey story. Session 39 — Belfast Hidden Tours: A Celebration of Belfast's Whiskey Heritage and New Production — was never going to be a quiet affair, and it didn't disappoint. From the first reel to the last dram poured before midnight, this was a session that felt rooted in the very dúchas of Belfast itself.

About This Event

Join us in the Music Hall at the Deer's Head where we plan on having live Trad Music, Some Irish Dancing, Storytelling and Whiskies flowing all the way through to midnight. Join us for an evening to remember at an Iconic venue in the City, making the most of the Festival vibes.

Looking Back

The Deer's Head is one of those venues that earns its reputation quietly but completely. Tucked into the Belfast Music Quarter, it carries the atmosphere of a place that has always known how to gather people in warmth and good sound. On this particular July evening, the Music Hall was configured for something more immersive than a standard tasting — live trad music filled the air from early doors, and the Irish dancing drew a crowd that ranged from seasoned festival regulars to first-timers who'd simply followed the music down the street. It was exactly the kind of organised serendipity that Belfast Whiskey Week does best.

The theme of heritage and new production gave the evening a pleasing tension — a conversation between what Belfast's whiskey culture once was and what it is becoming again. Storytelling formed a genuine centrepiece, not as a novelty act but as the connective tissue between drams. Attendees heard about the city's Victorian-era distilling past, its long silence, and the quiet confidence of its revival — a narrative arc that felt more meaningful with a glass in hand than it ever could on a page. The tír itself was the subject, and everyone in that room was part of the telling.

Whiskies flowed throughout the night in a manner that encouraged conversation rather than consumption for its own sake. With a festival programme that elsewhere offered deep dives into specific distilleries and expressions — including the kind of focused exploration you'd find in a Bushmills History MasterClass or the precision of a Bushmills Cask Strength Mini-MasterClass — Session 39 offered something complementary: breadth over depth, celebration over curriculum. That's not a lesser achievement. It's a different and necessary one.

There was something genuinely moving about the way the evening held together. The music and the dancing and the whiskey weren't three separate things happening in the same room — they were one thing, a mood, a sláinte offered to the city itself. Belfast's whiskey revival is still young enough to feel exciting and already old enough to have something worth commemorating. For those who wanted to map that revival across producers and places, the Belfast Whiskey Map offered a useful companion to the stories shared on stage.

By the time midnight approached and the last tunes wound down, the room had that particular glow that comes not from the whiskey alone but from the sense of having been somewhere that mattered. Session 39 was, in the truest sense, a hidden tour made visible — the history pulled up from the sheugh of memory, dusted off, and passed around like a well-worn bottle among old friends. We'd go back in a heartbeat.