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: 4 min
Ref: BWW/25/916

There are few finer ways to fall in love with a city than to walk its streets with a dram in hand and a guide who knows every sheugh and secret doorway. At Belfast Whiskey Week 2025, Conor Owens of Belfast Hidden Tours did exactly that — leading groups through the beating heart of Belfast on a whiskey and food walking tour that was equal parts history lesson, tasting session, and pure craic.

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

Meeting each morning at the welcoming surrounds of Room2 Hotel on Queen Street, the tour gathered its participants — a reliably mixed crowd of local whiskey enthusiasts, curious visitors, and a few folk who freely admitted they were mainly there for the food — before setting off into the city. From the very first step, it was clear this was no ordinary tasting. Conor has spent years curating Belfast's hidden gems, and he brought that same instinct for the overlooked and the underappreciated to this tour. The streets, laneways and pub interiors that formed the route weren't chosen at random; each stop carried the weight of seanchas — that living tradition of story and place — and Conor wore it lightly, weaving Belfast's whiskey heritage into the fabric of the walk without ever turning it into a lecture.

Across four distinct locations, guests were treated to at least four sips of local whiskey, each pour carefully chosen to reflect where the city has come from and where it is now. The current resurgence of Irish whiskey — and Belfast's own growing place within it — was felt at every stop. Between pours, the whiskey-infused food offerings ranged from ice-pops and donuts to burgers and chips, and more than a few eyebrows were raised in pleasant surprise at how well a smoky dram pairs with a properly loaded burger in the back of a Victorian pub. This was uisce beatha made approachable, celebratory, and deeply local all at once.

What Conor does particularly well is hold the room — or in this case, the street corner — for everyone. You genuinely did not need to be a whiskey devotee to get something profound from this tour. First-timers found themselves asking questions, making notes, and reaching for second sips. Those with more experience in the glass found new context for familiar drams. The format ran daily from Friday 18th to Saturday 26th July, which meant the tour accumulated a wonderful variety of groups across the week, each bringing its own energy to the experience. For those who also explored the city on foot through related events like the Belfast Hidden Tours: Walking, Whiskies & Whispers or Irish Whiskey Review: Walking With Marty, this tour felt like a natural companion piece — different in tone and texture, but sharing the same conviction that Belfast deserves to be understood at walking pace.

At £30 a head, this was one of the festival's most accessible and generous offerings. The combination of drams, food, stories, and the simple pleasure of danderin' through streets you thought you knew made it feel like considerably more. Belfast, like good whiskey, rewards those who slow down and pay attention — and this tour asked exactly that of everyone who joined it. If the Belfast Whiskey Map shows you where the city's whiskey life is concentrated, then Conor's tour was the thing that made that map come alive underfoot. It was one of BWW2025's most quietly essential experiences, and if it returns next year, our advice is simple: book early, wear comfortable shoes, and arrive hungry.

For the full picture of what Belfast Whiskey Week's walking tour programme looked like across the festival, the Belfast Walking Tours: Belfast's Public Houses & Art Trail offered another complementary route through the city's pub heritage — and together, the two tours made for a rather complete education in what Belfast does best.