Belfast Hidden Tours Whiskey Walk – Belfast Whiskey Week 2024

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

Filed: 26 Jul 2024
By: Belfast Whiskey Week
Read: 3 min
Ref: BWW/24/748

Some of the finest drams are best savoured on the move, and Belfast Hidden Tours proved that point beautifully when they kicked off each morning of Belfast Whiskey Week 2024 with their bespoke whiskey and walking tour of the city. Part seanchas, part sláinte, and entirely Belfast, this £15 session took a small, attentive group of whiskey lovers off the well-worn tourist trail and into the living, breathing story of a city shaped by its uisce beatha.

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

There is a particular kind of magic that happens when you hand someone a dram and then ask them to walk with you through the streets that made it. Belfast Hidden Tours have built their reputation on exactly this — the belief that the best way to understand a city's whiskey heritage is to feel the cobbles underfoot, peer into the sheughs between old industrial buildings, and listen to a guide who genuinely loves what they're telling you. On a July morning in 2024, that magic was very much alive.

The tour combined Belfast's proud industrial whiskey history with the kind of hidden places that most visitors — and, frankly, many locals — walk past without a second glance. Guides brought warmth, wit, and real knowledge to the telling of stories about the individuals and businesses who built Belfast's distilling industry across centuries. This wasn't a rehearsed recitation; it was the living duchas of a city reclaiming its rightful place on the world whiskey map. Attendees who had perhaps spent the previous evening exploring sessions like the Bushmills History MasterClass found a complementary perspective here — one that put those same historical threads into the physical landscape of the city itself.

A highlight that nobody quite expected: the collaboration with local producers elevated this well beyond a simple tasting walk. Belfast Hidden Tours had partnered with Oh Donuts and with Daisies — the charming city centre restaurant that served as the tour's home base — to create bespoke whiskey donuts and handcrafted chocolates that paired with the drams along the way. Daisies, with its focus on local ingredients and Irish whiskey experiences, was a natural fit, and the chocolates they contributed were a genuine surprise — thoughtfully made and genuinely complementary to the spirits being poured. It was a reminder that whiskey culture in Belfast is not a single-industry affair; it reaches into bakeries, kitchens, and craft producers across the city.

For those whose curiosity about the broader Ulster whiskey story was sparked by this walk, the festival offered plenty of threads to pull. The Bushmills New Cask Finish Range introduction and the deep-dive Causeway Collection MasterClass both provided the glass-in-hand detail to complement what the walking tour offered in landscape and lore. Together, they made for a rich and rounded understanding of what this tír has always known how to do.

At £15, Session 70 was among the most accessible events on the Belfast Whiskey Week programme — and arguably among the most memorable. It asked nothing more of attendees than comfortable shoes, an open mind, and a willingness to listen. In return, it gave them the city itself, one dram at a time.