Bushmills History MasterClass – Belfast Whiskey Week 2021

Some evenings at Belfast Whiskey Week carry the quiet weight of genuine history — and Session 83, the Bushmills History MasterClass held on 30th July 2021, was precisely that kind of night. Six carefully chosen expressions, spanning decades of one of Ireland's most storied distilleries, arrived in tasting packs posted to doorsteps across the island and beyond. For those who collected their packs in Belfast, there was something especially fitting about cracking open a piece of Bushmills history just a short distance from the distillery's home on the North Antrim coast.

Filed: 30 Jul 2021
By: Belfast Whiskey Week
Read: 3 min
Format: Online Tasting
Ref: BWW/21/660

About This Event

This tasting includes 6 x 50ml Samples & Glass and will take place on the 30th @ 18:00.

This tasting comprises of:

Bushmills 3 Star 1970s 43%
Bushmills Special Liqueur 1970s
10yo Single Malt 2nd Ed 40%
16yo Single Malt 1st Ed 40%
Bushmills Single Cask #10663 No.0057 d.1991 Full Rum Cask Maturation - 43%
Bushmills 10yo Sherry Cask Finished - 46%

Tasting packs will be posted out to you, but may not arrive in time for the tastings. If you wish to collect the pack in Belfast to ensure you have it in time, please contact grace@belfastwhiskeyweek.com after you order.

Looking Back

Old Bushmills Distillery holds a duchas — a deep belonging — to the landscape of Ulster that few producers anywhere in the whiskey world can match. Licensed since 1608, it stands in the village of Bushmills in the shadow of the Giant's Causeway, where the basalt columns tumble into the North Channel. To taste through its archive, then, is less an exercise in connoisseurship and more an act of seanchas — the living tradition of passed-down knowledge made tangible in the glass. Session 83 gave attendees exactly that opportunity.

The flight opened with two bottlings from the 1970s: the Bushmills 3 Star at 43% and the Special Liqueur, both relics of an era when Irish whiskey occupied a very different place in the world's affections. These were revelatory in the way that old spirits often are — carrying flavours shaped by production methods, cask policies and a general attitude to whiskey-making that has since been thoroughly revised. Tasted alongside the 10 Year Old Single Malt Second Edition and the 16 Year Old Single Malt First Edition — both at 40% — the evolution of the distillery's house style over the decades became strikingly clear. What Bushmills does with triple distillation and those long, slow maturings in seasoned oak is a masterclass in patience made liquid.

The real talking points of the evening, though, were the two cask-specific expressions that anchored the latter half of the tasting. Single Cask #10663, cask number 0057, was distilled in 1991 and had spent its entire maturation in a full rum cask before being bottled at 43% — a combination that placed the distillery's characteristic lightness and orchard-fruit character against a tropical, molasses-warmed backdrop. And then the 10 Year Old Sherry Cask Finish at 46% brought the flight back to something more familiar yet no less compelling: rich dried fruit and warm spice rounding out that unmistakable Bushmills DNA. Those who had also attended Session 50: Bushmills Causeway Collection or the Bushmills Cask Strength Mini-MasterClass would have found satisfying echoes across the festival's wider Bushmills programming.

At £120 for six 50ml samples and a glass, Session 83 asked attendees to invest meaningfully — and rewarded them generously. The 1970s bottlings alone represented access to liquid history that rarely surfaces outside specialist auction rooms, and the guided format ensured that their context was as well understood as their content. For those who came to BWW 2021 eager to understand not just what Bushmills tastes like today but where it has come from, this was the essential session. The fuller picture of the distillery's present was available across the festival — from the New Cask Finish Range Introduction to the Core Malts — but Session 83 was where the past spoke most clearly.

Sláinte to everyone who raised a glass that Friday evening, wherever they were sitting. Some drams deserve to be drunk slowly, with time given over to what they carry. These were those drams.