Bushmills Brilliance Tasting | Belfast Whiskey Week 2024

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

Filed: 27 Jul 2024
By: Belfast Whiskey Week
Read: 3 min
Ref: BWW/24/572

There are distilleries you visit once and distilleries that become part of your duchas — your sense of belonging to a place and its story. Old Bushmills is firmly the latter, and Session 79: Bushmills Brilliance, held on 27th July 2024 at Belfast's beloved Duke of York, gave a room full of whiskey lovers the chance to sit with that truth for an hour or so and really savour it. Three drams. One of the great names in uisce beatha. No pretence, no preamble — just brilliance.

About This Event

Bushmills should not be taken for granted. The Causeway Collection has been a massive wake-up call to the rest of the Irish Whiskey Industry. Bushmills is Brilliant. This is Great opportunity to meet Bushmills at such an amazing time of growth for the business. Let's enjoy 3 Perfect drams from the World’s Oldest Licensed Distillery.

Looking Back

It would be easy, if you grew up in Ulster, to take Bushmills for granted. It sits there on the North Antrim coast, a mile from the Giant's Causeway, doing what it has been doing since 1608 — or at least since the licence was granted that year, making it the world's oldest licensed whiskey distillery. Familiarity, though, is not the same as understanding, and that was precisely the spirit (in every sense) of this session. The room at the Duke of York was there not just to drink, but to wake up and pay attention.

And there was plenty to pay attention to. The Causeway Collection — Bushmills' premium single malt series drawing on rare and unusual cask finishes — has been nothing short of a statement of intent from a distillery that some had, unfairly, filed under 'reliable but comfortable.' Reliable it certainly is. Comfortable it no longer settles for. The three drams poured during the session were chosen to illustrate the range and ambition now running through the brand, and they did exactly that. Each glass was a conversation starter rather than a full stop. If you wanted to go deeper into the Causeway story, Session 50: Bushmills Causeway Collection MasterClass offered that fuller immersion across the festival programme.

The Duke of York is a fitting setting for this kind of tasting. Tucked into Commercial Court in the heart of Belfast city centre, it carries its own seanchas — its own layered history — in every timber and tile. There's something right about raising a glass of Bushmills Single Malt in a pub that has itself weathered decades of Belfast life and come out the other side with character intact. The atmosphere on the night was easy and curious in equal measure, with the kind of cross-generational crowd that Belfast Whiskey Week tends to draw: seasoned collectors alongside first-timers who had simply heard that this was worth their Saturday evening.

At £15 for three quality pours with knowledgeable guidance, this was one of the festival's more accessible entry points — a Straight Whiskey Tasting format designed to welcome rather than intimidate. For those who found their appetite whetted, the wider BWW2024 programme offered a natural next step: Session 23: Bushmills Cask Strength went further into the distillery's more muscular expressions, while those curious about the brand's longer arc could trace it back through Session 83: Bushmills History MasterClass. Taken together, these sessions amounted to a proper education — but Session 79 stood perfectly well on its own two feet as an evening's worth of sláinte and genuine discovery.

Bushmills is brilliant. The session said so plainly, and the drams proved it. Sometimes the simplest argument is the strongest one.