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/25/292

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 where all the good stories are buried. That's exactly what Conor Owens offered at Belfast Hidden Whiskey Tours during Belfast Whiskey Week 2025 — a dander through the heart of Belfast that wove together uisce beatha, local food, and the kind of seanchas you simply won't find in any guidebook.

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 at the Room2 Hotel on Queen Street each day from Friday 18th to Saturday 26th July, groups gathered in the lobby not quite sure what to expect — only that they'd been promised at least four sips at four locations and a combination of ice-pops, donuts, chocolates, burgers, or chips along the way. It was a promise Conor kept with considerable style. From the moment the group stepped out onto Queen Street, it was clear this wasn't a standard tasting tour. This was a walking conversation with a city.

Conor Owens has built a well-earned reputation for revealing Belfast's duchas — its inherited sense of place and belonging — to visitors and locals alike through his Belfast Hidden Tours. For Belfast Whiskey Week, he turned that same instinct toward the island's great water of life. The route threaded through laneways and across thresholds that many Belfasters walk past daily without a second glance, pausing at historical pubs and venues whose walls hold decades of memory. At each stop, a local whiskey appeared, and with it a few words about what it meant — where it came from, who made it, and why it mattered to this particular tír.

What distinguished this tour from a conventional tasting was the food. Whiskey and ice-pops sounds like a novelty, and perhaps it is — but it worked. The sweetness of a donut against the grain of a young single malt, or the salt of chips cutting through a richer, more sherried dram, reminded participants that whiskey has always been part of everyday life in Ireland, not something kept behind glass. You didn't need to arrive as a connoisseur. Plenty of those who joined had never paid much attention to whiskey before. By the final stop, most were already planning what to explore next. If you're curious about where Belfast's whiskey story sits geographically, our Whiskey Map is a good place to start.

The tour also served as an informal history lesson, and a timely one. Belfast's whiskey industry is in genuine resurgence — new distilleries, new expressions, new ambitions — and Conor framed that revival against the longer arc of the city's past with quiet authority. There was nothing lecturing about it. It felt more like walking alongside someone who simply loves the place and wants you to love it too. For those who had already joined Belfast Walking Tours' Public Houses & Art Trail in previous festival years, this felt like a natural companion piece — same streets, a different lens.

At £30 a ticket, Belfast Hidden Whiskey Tours was one of the best-value events of BWW2025, and one of the most quietly affecting. The sheugh between knowing a city and truly feeling it is often wider than we realise. Conor Owens has a rare gift for bridging it — and with a dram in your hand and the Belfast skyline above you, that gap closed a little further with every step. Sláinte.