Cocktail Making with Glens of Antrim | 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: 4 min
Ref: BWW/25/252

On a Wednesday afternoon in July, the air inside Angel & 2 Bibles carried the unmistakable promise of something made with care — shakers in hand, glasses lined up, and three expressions from Glens of Antrim Distillery waiting to be put to work. This cocktail masterclass, one of a daily series run throughout Belfast Whiskey Week 2025, invited guests not just to taste but to create — guided through three bespoke festival cocktails by the bar team at one of Belfast's most characterful venues.

About This Event

Everyday during the Festival, we have partnered with one of Belfast’s finest Cocktail lounges: Angel & 2 Bibles. We have built up a great relationship with this quirky and nostalgic venue of the past 4 years, and hosted multiple parties, tastings, fine-dining experiences, as well as the best cocktail experiences in Belfast.

This year we are challenging the staff, the venue, and you to deliver a unique cocktail master class everyday during the festival.

Each session will have three unique drinks, using Whiskies and possibly some other spirits from our local distilleries such as Poitín or Gin or Vodka or even Rum.

You’ll get to make the cocktails, after our well versed and experienced mixologists walk you through the step by step process of making bespoke Cocktails designed for the festival.

This Session will use 3 Whiskies from the Glens of Antrim Distillery range.

Looking Back

There is something quietly radical about handing someone a jigger and saying: you make it. The cocktail masterclasses at Angel & 2 Bibles have become one of the most beloved formats in the Belfast Whiskey Week calendar, and this session — built around the Glens of Antrim range — was a particular pleasure. The venue itself sets the tone before a drop is poured: tucked away and thick with nostalgia, Angel & 2 Bibles is the kind of place that feels like it has its own seanchas, its own accumulated stories. It has hosted BWW parties, tastings, and fine-dining evenings over four years of partnership with the festival, and by now the relationship runs easy and warm.

Glens of Antrim Distillery brings something distinctive to any session it anchors. The glens themselves — steep, green, running straight to the sea — are already among the most arresting landscapes in Ulster, and the distillery carries that North Coast character into its whiskeys. This is uisce beatha shaped by tír: by the salt air, the drama of the Antrim coast, the deep duchas of a place that has been producing and appreciating fine spirits for generations. Three expressions from their range formed the backbone of the afternoon's cocktails, and the mixologists wove each one into drinks designed specifically for the festival — not generic templates, but builds that asked each whiskey to do something particular.

Guests who had perhaps never held a Boston shaker with any confidence left the session with three new cocktails in their repertoire and a sharper sense of what makes the Glens of Antrim range tick. The step-by-step format worked well: unhurried enough to explain the reasoning behind each choice — why this modifier, why this ratio — but lively enough to keep the room buzzing. There was laughter, the occasional overzealous muddle, and the satisfying moment when everyone lifted their first finished drink and offered a collective sláinte. At £25 a session, it offered genuine craft learning alongside generous pours, which is a hard balance to strike.

It was also worth noting how this session sat within a broader Glens of Antrim presence at BWW 2025. The distillery had already featured in dedicated showcase tastings earlier in the week, continuing a thread that stretches back through previous festivals — you can trace that journey through their 2024 showcase and earlier appearances that helped establish them as a fixture of the programme. Seeing the same brand move from a seated tasting format into a hands-on cocktail context showed real range, and gave returning festival-goers a fresh way into spirits they may already have encountered neat or on the rocks.

If you attended any of the other masterclass sessions in this year's daily series — whether that was the Hinch Distillery afternoon or the Douglas Laing session — you'll know the format rewards repeat visits. Each distillery brings its own flavour profile and its own story to the bar, and Angel & 2 Bibles gives every one of them the right kind of room. This Glens of Antrim session had the particular warmth of a brand that knows its landscape and is glad to share it.