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/25/756

There are few better ways to understand a city than to walk its streets with a dram in hand — and at Belfast Whiskey Week 2025, Conor Owens of Belfast Hidden Tours proved exactly that. Event 43, the Belfast Hidden Whiskey Tour, was a proper dander through the heart of the city: through laneways and pub doors, past layers of history, and into a story of whiskey's deep roots in Ulster life and its remarkable modern resurgence. At £30 a head, it offered something no tasting room ever quite can — the streets themselves as a venue.

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

The tour gathered each day at Room2 Hotel on Queen Street — a fitting anchor point, sitting as it does at a crossroads between Belfast's commercial present and its layered past. From there, Conor Owens led small groups out into a city that rewards those willing to look beyond the well-worn tourist paths. Conor has built a real reputation for revealing Belfast's hidden gems, and this commission for Belfast Whiskey Week was designed to do precisely that: not just to pour whiskey, but to place each dram within the duchas — the living heritage — of the streets around it.

Over the course of the tour, walkers were treated to at least four sips at four distinct locations, each chosen to tell a different chapter in Belfast's whiskey story. The tasting notes were woven into the local seanchas — the oral tradition of place and memory — so that a pour of local uisce beatha became inseparable from the building you stood in, or the lane you'd just passed through. This was whiskey education worn lightly, never lecturing, always inviting. Whether you arrived as a seasoned enthusiast or a curious first-timer, you left knowing more about this city and its liquid heritage than when you started.

What set this tour apart from a conventional tasting was the food. Whiskey-infused ice-pops, doughnuts, chocolates, burgers, and chips appeared at intervals throughout the walk — a playful, generous thread that kept energy high and underlined the point that whiskey belongs in kitchens and street corners as much as in tasting glasses. It was convivial in the truest sense: food and drink as a reason to linger, to talk, to connect with strangers who quickly stopped being strangers. A proper Belfast welcome, in other words.

This event sits naturally alongside a broader tradition of whiskey walking tours that Belfast Whiskey Week has championed across its history. Previous editions have seen related outings such as Belfast Hidden Tours: Walking, Whiskies & Whispers and Irish Whiskey Review: Walking With Marty draw devoted audiences — and the enduring appeal of these events speaks to something real. Belfast is a city whose story is written into its pub walls, its cobblestones, its surviving Victorian facades. Walking it with whiskey is, in many ways, the most honest way to read it. If you want to trace more of the city's whiskey geography for yourself, our Belfast Whiskey Map is a fine place to start.

Running daily from Friday 18th to Saturday 26th July, the tour found its rhythm over multiple outings — each one shaped slightly differently by the group, the weather, the conversations that sprang up. That's the nature of a good walking tour: it's never quite the same twice. Conor Owens brought warmth, knowledge, and genuine affection for this city to every step. Sláinte to him, to the venues that opened their doors, and to everyone who pulled on their shoes and came along for the dander.