Belfast Hidden Whiskey Tours | Walking Tour | Belfast Whiskey Week 2025

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

Filed: 15 Jul 2025
By: Belfast Whiskey Week
Read: 3 min
Ref: BWW/25/380

There are few finer ways to understand a city than on foot, glass in hand, with someone who genuinely loves the place. That was precisely the spirit of the Belfast Hidden Whiskey Tour at Belfast Whiskey Week 2025 — a walking journey through the lanes, pubs, and storied corners of Belfast that wove together uisce beatha, local food, and the living seanchas of this city's remarkable whiskey heritage.

About This Event

It’s not often you get the chance to taste your way through the history of a city.

Join Conor Owens on an inspirational walking tour of Belfast, where you will get to sip local whiskies and savour our whiskey infused food offerings. Conor is known for showing Belfast’s Hidden gems, and has designed our whiskey walking tour to do just that. You’ll be treated to at least 4 sips at 4 locations and a combination of Ice-pops, Donuts, Chocolates, Burgers or Chips on your tour.
To get a real understanding of Belfast’s colourful history, and Whiskey Heritage and current resurgence of the whiskey industry, you’ll dander through the streets, lanes, and through the doors of our historical pubs and venues.

You don’t have to be a whiskey lover, to love this whiskey and food walking tour; you’ll quickly garner a thirst and build up and appetite as you explore.
Meeting Point to Start: Inside Our Hotel Partner; Room2 Hotel, Queen Street, Belfast BT1 6EE at 12pm each day Friday 18th to Saturday 26th July

Looking Back

Running daily from Friday 18th to Saturday 26th July, the tour gathered its walkers each noon inside the welcoming lobby of the Room2 Hotel on Queen Street — a fitting modern starting point for a journey that would move steadily backwards and forwards through time. From there, guide Conor Owens took over, and what followed was something that sat comfortably between history lesson, tasting session, and genuine Belfast craic. Conor is well known for his Belfast Hidden Tours work, and he brought that same gift for revealing the overlooked and underappreciated to this festival commission.

Over the course of the tour, participants stopped at no fewer than four locations across the city, each offering a sip of local whiskey alongside something to eat — because Conor understands that the tír you're tasting through deserves more than just a glass. Depending on the day and the stops, that meant whiskey-infused ice pops on a warm July afternoon, freshly made donuts, rich chocolates, or something more substantial: burgers and chips to line the stomach before the next pour. It was unpretentious, generous, and very Belfast.

The whiskeys poured were rooted in the city's current renaissance — a resurgence that Belfast Whiskey Week has championed since its earliest editions. If you want to trace that story across the city for yourself, our Whiskey Map gives a sense of just how many distilleries, bars, and makers are now part of this landscape. Conor put flesh on those bones, explaining not just what was in the glass but why Belfast's relationship with whiskey is layered, complicated, and genuinely exciting again.

This tour sat naturally alongside several other walking experiences that have become a cornerstone of the festival programme. The Belfast Hidden Tours: Walking, Whiskies & Whispers event and the Belfast Walking Tours: Belfast's Public Houses & Art Trail have long offered their own distinct takes on the city's dram-soaked geography, and together they form a kind of ambulatory curriculum for anyone serious about understanding Belfast through its whiskey culture. The Hidden Whiskey Tour felt like a natural companion to all of them — more intimate, perhaps, and more focused on the sensory pleasure of eating and drinking well as you walk.

At £30 a head, this was one of the festival's most accessible entry points, and deliberately so. Conor was clear from the start: you don't have to be a whiskey lover to love this tour. More than a few participants who arrived as curious food-first visitors left with a genuine dúchas for the spirit — a felt connection to where it comes from and what it means. That, as much as any tasting note, is what Belfast Whiskey Week is for. Sláinte.