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/25/740

There are ways to learn a city, and then there are ways to taste it. Belfast Hidden Tours' Conor Owens offered something rare during Belfast Whiskey Week 2025 — a dander through the streets, lanes, and historical pubs of Belfast that wove together the uisce beatha in your glass with the seanchas beneath your feet. This was Event 107, and for those lucky enough to join, it was one of the festival's most distinctive afternoons.

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

Running daily from Friday 18th to Saturday 26th July, the tour gathered its groups inside the welcoming surroundings of Room2 Hotel on Queen Street — a fitting threshold between the contemporary Belfast and the older, storied city waiting just outside the door. From that meeting point at noon, Conor set the tone immediately: unhurried, warm, and full of the kind of local knowledge you simply cannot find in a guidebook. This was duchas made walkable.

Over the course of the tour, participants took in at least four sips of local whiskey at four distinct locations — a structure that felt less like a tasting itinerary and more like a conversation unfolding across the city. Each pour was a pause, a moment to take stock of where you were standing and why that particular spot mattered. Belfast's whiskey heritage is long, its interruption longer still, and its current resurgence genuinely thrilling; Conor had the rare gift of making that arc feel personal rather than academic.

What elevated this beyond a standard whiskey walk was the food. Ice-pops, doughnuts, chocolates, burgers, chips — Conor had designed the route so that whiskey-infused bites arrived at the right moments, keeping energy high and palates curious. It was unapologetically fun, and all the better for it. You didn't need to arrive as a whiskey devotee to leave as one; the combination of street food, local spirit, and genuine storytelling did that work quietly and thoroughly. Those who'd also joined Belfast Hidden Tours' earlier Walking, Whiskies & Whispers event will have recognised Conor's signature blend of mischief and mastery.

The route itself moved through the sheughs and side streets that most visitors — and plenty of locals — walk past without a second glance. Historical pubs revealed layers of character; lanes opened onto unexpected corners; the city's complicated, colourful past surfaced in anecdote and architecture alike. For festival-goers who had also taken in Belfast Walking Tours' Public Houses & Art Trail, there was a pleasing sense of the same city being revealed from a different angle, each tour a different facet of the same stone.

At £30, Event 107 represented exceptional value — not just in the liquid and food on offer, but in the quality of company and storytelling that made those two-plus hours feel like an investment in understanding Belfast rather than simply passing through it. Slàinte to Conor and the Belfast Hidden Tours team for crafting something that belonged entirely to this city. If you're curious about where whiskey sits within Belfast's wider story, our Whiskey Map is a good place to start planning your next visit.