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/25/828

There are many ways to learn a city, but few as pleasurable as tasting your way through it. On Belfast Hidden Whiskey Tours — Event 71 of Belfast Whiskey Week 2025 — guide Conor Owens led groups through the living, breathing streetscape of Belfast, weaving together the city's whiskey heritage, its hidden architectural gems, and a generously curated spread of whiskey-infused food. It was, in the truest sense, a dander worth taking.

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 through to Saturday 26th July, ticketholders gathered at noon ready for something a little different from the standard festival tasting. The Room2 is a fitting launchpad — a hotel that wears its city lightly, comfortable and contemporary, right in the heart of Belfast. From there, Conor set the tone: unhurried, curious, rooted in the seanchas of the place. This wasn't a whiskey lecture with legs; it was a proper conversation with the city.

Over the course of the tour, guests were treated to at least four sips at four distinct locations — local whiskies chosen to reflect both Belfast's historic relationship with uisce beatha and the current, thrilling resurgence of Ulster distilling. Between drams, the food offerings did serious work: whiskey-spiked ice-pops on sun-warmed streets, rich chocolates, donuts, and the grounding comfort of burgers and chips. It was the kind of eating and drinking that doesn't feel like indulgence so much as good sense — fuel for the curious, reward for the willing.

Conor Owens has built a well-earned reputation for revealing the Belfast that locals half-forget and visitors rarely find. The lanes, the Victorian pub interiors, the stories folded into the brickwork — he surfaces them with a storyteller's instinct rather than a tour guide's script. This event sat naturally alongside the wider Belfast Hidden Tours: Walking, Whiskies & Whispers strand that has grown across festival years, and for those who've followed that thread from previous editions, Event 71 felt like a confident evolution — more food, more drams, more depth.

What made this tour genuinely accessible was its insistence that you needn't be a whiskey devotee to belong here. Conor's framing of Belfast's distilling past and its contemporary revival gave context without condescension, and the food pairings meant there was always something to anchor you if a dram felt unfamiliar. That spirit of welcome — of pulling people into the circle rather than testing whether they deserve to be there — is exactly what Belfast Whiskey Week aims for at its best. If you've been curious about how the city and the spirit are intertwined, the Belfast Whiskey Map offers a useful companion view of just how richly that geography runs.

At £30 a head, this was one of the festival's stronger value propositions: four locations, four whiskey sips, food at every turn, and a guide who clearly loves the tír he's walking you through. For those who attended similar outings like Belfast Walking Tours: Belfast's Public Houses & Art Trail, this felt like a kindred spirit — different in flavour, but driven by the same belief that the best way to understand a place is to walk it slowly, glass in hand. Sláinte.