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/25/452

There are cities you visit, and there are cities you taste. At Belfast Whiskey Week 2025, Conor Owens of Belfast Hidden Tours offered something altogether rarer — a chance to do both at once, dander in hand and dram at the ready, as participants wound their way through the living seanchas of Belfast's streets, pubs, and hidden corners. Event 27, the Belfast Hidden Whiskey Tour, was one of the festival's most loved and most talked-about experiences across its nine-day run.

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

Each morning from Friday 18th to Saturday 26th July, a fresh group gathered inside the Room2 Hotel on Queen Street — a fitting starting point, sitting as it does at the edge of the city centre's older grain. From there, Conor led his charges out into Belfast with the kind of easy authority that only comes from genuine love of a place. This wasn't a rehearsed recitation of dates and plaques; it was duchas — inherited knowledge worn lightly, shared freely. Conor knows where the city keeps its stories, and he knows which doors to knock on to find them.

Across the tour, participants sipped at least four local whiskies across four distinct locations, each dram chosen to reflect something of the tír they were standing in. Belfast's whiskey heritage is deep and its current resurgence is real — and this tour made both tangible in a way that a distillery visit alone never quite can. Between pours, the food was a genuine pleasure: whiskey-infused ice-pops, donuts glazed with something smoky-sweet, rich chocolates, and the kind of burger and chips that a long walk through Belfast earns you. It was generous, considered, and — crucially — fun. This wasn't a solemn pilgrimage. It was a sláinte on two feet.

What Conor does well, and what made this event stand apart even within a packed festival programme, is his instinct for the unexpected. The lanes, the snugs, the pubs that haven't changed their signage since the Troubles — these were not backdrop, they were the point. For visitors to the city, it offered context that no guidebook provides. For Belfast people themselves, it offered the particular pleasure of seeing your own tír through fresh eyes. More than one local participant was heard admitting they'd passed a particular door a hundred times without ever knowing what lay behind it.

It's worth noting that the Belfast Hidden Whiskey Tour sat comfortably alongside several other walking experiences at BWW 2025. Fans of this format may also want to revisit Belfast Hidden Tours: Walking, Whiskies & Whispers or explore the city's licensed heritage through Belfast Walking Tours: Belfast's Public Houses & Art Trail. For those who prefer their city history with a guide and a glass rather than a map and a museum, Irish Whiskey Review: Walking With Marty offered another strong companion experience across the festival week.

At £30 a head, the Belfast Hidden Whiskey Tour was, by any measure, a bargain — not just in value, but in the kind of return that doesn't show up on a receipt. Participants left with fuller stomachs, warmer cheeks, and a Belfast that felt a little more theirs. That's the real uisce beatha of this city: it gives itself to you generously, if you know how to walk through it. Conor Owens knows how to walk through it.