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/25/900

There are few finer ways to take the measure of a city than on foot, glass in hand, with someone who genuinely loves the place. That was the quiet promise behind Belfast Hidden Whiskey Tours, one of the most warmly received walking experiences of Belfast Whiskey Week 2025 — a daily dander through the streets, lanes, and storied public houses of Belfast that left participants both fed and full of wonder.

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 small group gathered inside the welcoming lobby of Room2 Hotel on Queen Street at noon, ready to hand themselves over to Conor Owens and whatever Belfast had in store. Conor is the guiding spirit behind Belfast Hidden Tours, a man who has spent years peeling back the city's more familiar face to reveal the duchas — the deep-rooted belonging — that hums beneath every cobbled laneway and crooked corner. For Belfast Whiskey Week, he turned that instinct towards the uisce beatha, and the results were something to savour.

The tour wound through at least four locations, each one chosen not merely for its whiskey offering but for what it said about the city's character and history. At every stop, participants raised a glass of local whiskey — the current resurgence of Ulster distilling was as much the subject as the spirit itself — and between pours there was food to match: ice-pops sticky with whiskey caramel, pillowy doughnuts dusted with something smoky-sweet, rich chocolates, proper Belfast burgers, chips hot from the fryer. It was seanchas and sustenance in equal measure, the kind of afternoon that builds a real appetite — for the next dram and the next story alike.

What made this tour stand out from a conventional tasting was Conor's insistence on context. To understand why Belfast's whiskey heritage matters — why the city once sat at the heart of a global industry, why decades passed in near silence, and why the distilleries are returning now — you need to walk the tír itself. You need to duck through a sheugh of a side street to reach a snug that has been pouring since before partition, or stand at a bar where blenders once argued over grain ratios while dockers drank outside. Conor gave his guests that. It wasn't a lecture; it was a conversation with the city. Those curious about the broader geography of Belfast's whiskey revival would do well to explore the Belfast Whiskey Map as a companion to the tour's themes.

Belfast Whiskey Week has always believed that whiskey is a door, not a destination — that it opens conversations about place, people, and time more readily than almost anything else. This tour embodied that belief entirely. Conor explicitly designed it for people who might not yet call themselves whiskey lovers, and that generosity of spirit (no pun withheld) showed. By the third location, sceptics were asking questions about distillation; by the fourth, everyone was swapping notes on their favourite pour. Sláinte to that. For those who enjoyed the walking tour format at BWW 2025, it's worth looking back at the Belfast Hidden Tours: Walking, Whiskies & Whispers event from a previous year to see how this strand of the festival has grown and deepened over time.

At £30 a head, covering four drams, four locations, and a spread of whiskey-infused food, the Belfast Hidden Whiskey Tour represented exceptional value — not just financially, but in the harder-to-quantify currency of a city genuinely sharing itself. We hope to see Conor back on the streets for future festivals, leading more visitors and locals alike into the Belfast that only reveals itself when you slow down, look up, and take a sip.