Bushmills 10 Year Old Deconstructed Tasting | Belfast Whiskey Week 2023

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

Filed: 15 Jul 2023
By: Belfast Whiskey Week
Read: 4 min
Ref: BWW/23/644

On a Thursday evening in late July 2023, the Garrick Bar — one of Belfast city centre's most cherished traditional haunts — filled with the kind of quiet anticipation that only uisce beatha can conjure. Bushmills, the grand old distillery of the North Antrim coast, had come to town for one of Belfast Whiskey Week's most intimate and illuminating session formats: a deconstructed tasting of their beloved 10 Year Old Single Malt. For two hours, the familiar became revelatory.

About This Event

Join Bushmills at The Garrick Bar for an exclusive deconstructed tasting of their signature Bushmills 10 Year Old Single Malt, hosted by @Whiskey4Breakfast.

Date: Thursday 27th July

Timeslot: 6pm-9pm

Start Time: 6.30pm

Duration: 2hrs

Venue: The Garrick Bar

Type: Deconstruction Tasting

Disclaimers

Please note that individual dietary requirements are not being catered for with any food at this event.

Each Brand/Distillery and Collaborative Partner have agreed to our Min/Max Pour Policy. Please Respect this, and enjoy your festival responsibly. Festival Participants who are deemed to be too inebriated, or are not respecting themselves, will not be permitted into events and venues. ALL Hosts/Ushers/Collaborators and Venue Staff have the right to refuse participants without question and recourse. Please Drink Responsibly.

All events are only available to those 18 years old and over. Do not purchase tickets if you are under the age of 18. Be prepared to produce ID if required. Venue staff & ushers may ask you to provide ID when showing your valid tickets. You may be refused enter to events if you can’t prove your age.

Some venues may change, if they do, you will be notified. All events are subject to changes out of the control of the festival organisers.

Any issues, please contact us @belfastwhiskeyweek on socials, or via email on marketing@belfastwhiskeyweek.com or 07773675179 (8am-8pm) to discuss.

NO Refunds will be given. Please only buy tickets if you are prepared to attend the event. Tickets are transferable. If you are going to transfer tickets please email, marketing@belfastwhiskeyweek.com

Looking Back

There is a particular pleasure in being handed something you think you already know and being asked to look again. That was the gift of Session 101, hosted with easy authority by the ever-engaging @Whiskey4Breakfast, whose knack for threading knowledge through conversation — rather than lecturing over it — made the evening feel less like a class and more like a long, good-natured debate between friends who happen to know a great deal about whiskey. The Garrick Bar, with its dark wood, its seanchas soaked into the walls, provided exactly the right kind of shelter for that sort of gathering.

The Bushmills 10 Year Old is, in many ways, the distillery's handshake with the wider world — the expression most likely to be someone's first encounter with Irish single malt. Triple-distilled from malted barley and matured for a decade in a combination of bourbon and sherry casks, it remains a benchmark of its style: light and honeyed on the nose, with a gentle warmth and that characteristic Bushmills elegance that never tips into excess. But a deconstructed tasting doesn't let a whiskey rest on its reputation. Attendees were guided through the constituent parts of what makes this dram what it is — the spirit character, the cask influence, the interplay of time and wood — before encountering the finished whiskey with newly calibrated senses. It was the difference between hearing a song and understanding how it was written.

Bushmills is a distillery that wears its age with grace — officially the world's oldest licensed whiskey distillery, it has been drawing water from Saint Columb's Rill on the Causeway Coast since 1608, and the 10 Year Old carries that duchas quietly, without bluster. The session drew natural connections to the wider festival programme; those who had explored the Bushmills History MasterClass or attended the Bushmills Causeway Collection MasterClass would have found this deconstructed format a rich companion piece — one that grounded the historical and the exceptional in the everyday pleasure of a well-made ten-year-old malt.

At a tenner a ticket, the value was, frankly, indecent. The Garrick Bar's staff — warm, unhurried, and quietly proud of the whiskey they were pouring — added to a sense of occasion that never tipped into formality. This is what Belfast Whiskey Week does at its best: it takes the distance out of whiskey, pulls it off the shelf and into the conversation, and reminds you that the point of the whole endeavour is to understand and enjoy what's in your glass. Sláinte to everyone who was in the room that evening — you'll have left with a deeper appreciation of a bottle you may well have walked past a hundred times.

If this session has sparked your curiosity about the Bushmills family, it's worth exploring the Bushmills Core Malts Introduction from earlier in the festival programme, or venturing further afield on our Whiskey Map to trace the distilleries and stories that shape Irish and Ulster whiskey to this day.