Blind Whiskey Tasting at John Hewitt | 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/25/716

There are few tests more humbling — or more illuminating — than a blind tasting. On a warm Wednesday afternoon in July 2025, a room full of whiskey lovers gathered at the John Hewitt Bar in Belfast's Cathedral Quarter and agreed, collectively, to trust nothing but their own senses. Event 73: The Blind Leading the Blind: Taste will Prevail was exactly the kind of honest, unpretentious whiskey experience that Belfast Whiskey Week does best.

Looking Back

The John Hewitt is the sort of place that has character baked into its walls — a worker-owned institution on Donegall Street with a long tradition of good conversation, live music, and a bar that takes its drinks seriously. It was a fitting venue for an afternoon built entirely on the premise that your preconceptions about whiskey mean nothing once the glass is in front of you. The venue change from the original location only added a little anticipation to proceedings, and if anything, the John Hewitt's familiar warmth made for a better setting still.

The session itself was structured around a core truth that every seasoned whiskey drinker eventually has to reckon with: we are all, to some degree, drinking the label as much as the liquid. Strip away the bottle, the brand story, the price point, and the distillery romance, and what remains is pure uisce beatha — water of life in its most democratic form. Guests were poured a series of drams, noses were buried in glasses, notes were scribbled, confident declarations were made, and — more often than not — assumptions were gleefully overturned. The room's laughter told its own story.

What made the afternoon particularly rewarding was the range of whiskeys on the table. Without the anchoring detail of a single brand or region, attendees found themselves genuinely engaged in the kind of slow, attentive tasting that so many of us mean to do but rarely manage when the bottle is sitting right there in front of us. Aromas were debated, finishes were argued over, and the odd very confident wrong answer got the kind of warm Belfast slainte it deserved. At £20, it was one of the festival's most straightforward value propositions — and one of its most revealing afternoons.

Blind tastings occupy a special place in the seanchas of whiskey culture — they force a directness that strips away the duchas of received opinion. Whether you walked in as a seasoned single malt devotee or a curious newcomer still finding your way around the map of Irish and Scotch expressions, the experience levelled the field completely. If you're keen to explore the wider world of whiskey that Belfast Whiskey Week celebrates, our Whiskey Map is a fine place to start building your bearings. And for those who enjoy putting their palates through their paces in good company, events like WHISK(E)Y WARS: Tragedy. Treachery. The Perfect Single Malt. scratch a very similar competitive itch.

The afternoon wrapped up with glasses returned to their senses and — in most cases — a healthy recalibration of personal certainties. That, perhaps, is the greatest gift a blind tasting can offer: not just knowledge of whiskey, but a little knowledge of yourself. If you missed it this year, keep an eye on the Pop & Toast Art Exhibition and Fine Whiskey Tasting and similar specialist sessions when BWW returns — because events like this one are always among the first to sell out, and rightly so.