Bourbon & Cream at Neighbourhood Cafe | 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/25/980

There are evenings at Belfast Whiskey Week that catch you pleasantly off guard, and the Bourbon & Cream takeover at Neighbourhood Cafe on 20th July 2025 was precisely that kind of night. Billing itself with a knowing wink — the name was, by the organisers' own admission, slightly misleading — this intimate tasting turned its gaze west across the Atlantic, celebrating American whiskeys in all their breadth and boldness. With Brand Ambassador Cassandra at the helm and a menu built to match, it proved to be one of the festival's most quietly memorable sessions.

About This Event

Belfast Whiskey Week is Collaborating with Neighbourhood Cafe each day during the Festival. This is an unprecedented step for both BWW and Neighbourhood; with each event being completely different! Keep a lookout for our other collaborations.

Bourbon & Cream: The name might be slightly misleading - and that’s ok - however this tasting will focus on American Whiskies with American style food and a unique take on a Belfast/Irish Coffee. This will be a very exclusive tasting with our American Bran Ambassador Cassandra, who will take us on a journey with some fantastic Bourbons and US Whiskies.

Looking Back

Neighbourhood Cafe sits in the heart of Belfast city centre doing what a good local should: offering warmth, good food, and a refusal to take itself too seriously. For BWW 2025, it became something of a festival home from home, hosting a series of entirely distinct takeover events across the week. The Bourbon & Cream evening was one of several in that collaborative series with Neighbourhood, and each one had its own character — but this particular session, with its transatlantic focus, felt genuinely singular.

Cassandra, BWW's American Brand Ambassador, brought the kind of expertise that never tips into lecturing. She guided a deliberately small group through a curated selection of Bourbons and broader American whiskeys, taking time to draw out the regional and stylistic differences that often get lost when Bourbon is treated as a monolith. From the high-rye spice of certain Kentucky expressions to the softer grain-forward profiles emerging from newer American distillers, the lineup rewarded attention. This was uisce beatha on its own terms — not measured against Irish or Scotch tradition, but appreciated for what it is: a genuinely distinct and deep canon.

The food pairing was equally considered. American-style dishes — built for richness, for contrast, for the kind of food that understands whiskey is its natural companion — sat alongside each pour with real intention. But the evening's talking point, and perhaps its masterstroke, was the reimagined Belfast/Irish Coffee. Taking a much-loved local ritual and filtering it through an American lens, it was the kind of small creative act that felt entirely at home in a city that has always been good at making outside influences its own. Sláinte to that.

With just thirty guests at £30 a head, the exclusivity of the evening wasn't a marketing flourish — it was a genuine condition of what made it work. Conversation flowed between pours, questions were answered properly, and the atmosphere had the easy seanchas of people who came to learn and ended up just enjoying themselves. If you're curious what else the festival had on offer in a similar spirit, the Copeland Spirits takeover at Neighbourhood offered a closer-to-home contrast, while The Focacceria's Wine Finished Whiskies session explored different frontiers of the pairing craft entirely.

Bourbon & Cream was, in short, the kind of event that reminds you why Belfast Whiskey Week exists: not just to celebrate what's in the glass, but to build the context around it — the place, the people, the tír and the table. We hope Cassandra comes back next year. We suspect she will.