Boatyard Showcase | Belfast Whiskey Week 2021

Name: Belfast Whiskey Week 2026
Start: 2026-07-24
End: 2026-08-01
Location: Belfast

Filed: 31 Jul 2021
By: Belfast Whiskey Week
Read: 3 min
Ref: BWW/21/364

There are distilleries that make whiskey, and then there are distilleries that make a world — and Boatyard, nestled on the shores of Lough Erne in County Fermanagh, has always belonged firmly in the second camp. Session 80 of Belfast Whiskey Week 2021, held on the 31st of July, brought that world right to attendees' doors in the form of a trio of 100ml cocktails and a showcase format that felt as relaxed and convivial as a summer evening on the water. It was, by any measure, a proper evening's craic.

About This Event

This tasting includes 3 x 100ml Cocktails and will take place on the 31st @ 20:00.

For those in the USA, Australia, Sweden, Europe, the Republic of Ireland or Northern Ireland, you will be able to save on delivery costs by having your package to sent to a localised depot for collection. You will be charged a small fee upon collection, but the cost will be much cheaper than having packs delivered to individual addresses. If you would like to avail of this option, please make a note in the Special Instructions box, and we will contact you at a later date to arrange this and refund your delivery charges.

Looking Back

The Showcase format suited Boatyard down to the ground — or perhaps down to the lough shore. Where a MasterClass demands rigour and a tasting notebook at the ready, a Showcase invites you to settle in, let the liquid do the talking, and enjoy the company. Three 100ml cocktails arrived as part of the BWW2021 pack, each one a considered expression of what Boatyard does best: taking fine Irish spirit and framing it with ingredients that feel genuinely rooted in the landscape of the island. This wasn't garnish for its own sake. There was intention in every measure.

Boatyard is a distillery that wears its craft lightly but carries it seriously. Founded by Joe McGirr, the distillery produces both gin and whiskey with a philosophy grounded in provenance — the water, the grain, the place. That sense of dúchas, of belonging to a particular tír, came through in the cocktails that made up this session. Even at a remove, delivered to doors across Ireland, Europe, Australia, and the United States, the spirit of Fermanagh was present in the glass. That's no small achievement for a festival built largely on the power of the postal system during a particularly constrained summer.

The global reach of BWW2021 was one of the defining features of the whole week, and Session 80 was a fine example of it in action. Whether you were collecting your pack from a localised depot in Stockholm or sitting at a kitchen table in County Down, the experience was designed to feel shared. And shared it was — the online format, for all its limitations, had developed by late July 2021 into something genuinely communal. Hosts knew how to read a virtual room by then, and attendees had learned to pour at the right moment. It worked. If you were curious about how the wider week unfolded, the Sexton Deconstruction Showcase offered a similarly inventive take on Irish whiskey cocktail culture, while those who wanted to go deeper into the craft side of things found plenty to reward them in the Bushmills Cask Strength Mini-MasterClass.

At £25, Session 80 represented the kind of value that Belfast Whiskey Week has always quietly prided itself on — not cheap in a throwaway sense, but honest. You were paying for expertise, for spirit, for an hour or two of genuine engagement with a brand that has earned its reputation the hard way. The cocktail format also made this one of the more accessible entry points into the BWW programme; if you were new to Irish whiskey or simply fancied something a little more playful than a straight tasting, Boatyard's session was an easy place to start. For those who wanted to explore the broader landscape of the week, our Whiskey Map gives a sense of just how wide and varied the BWW2021 world really was.

Looking back, the Boatyard Showcase stands as a reminder that whiskey doesn't always have to be serious to be meaningful. Sláinte is a word that carries the weight of every good conversation and every well-made drink shared between people who know what they've got in their hands. On the 31st of July 2021, that was exactly what Session 80 offered — and it was more than enough.