Daisies X BWW: Chocolate & Whiskey Experience | 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/25/396

Some events at Belfast Whiskey Week ask you to sit back, sip, and absorb. This one asked you to roll up your sleeves, get a wee bit sticky, and let the duchas of good food and fine whiskey do what it does best — bring people together. On a summer Thursday afternoon in July 2025, Daisies played host to one of the festival's most joyfully indulgent sessions: a hands-on chocolate-making and whiskey-pairing experience that sent every single attendee home with a smile, a full belly, and very likely a few chocolates they'd already eaten before reaching the door.

About This Event

If you love chocolate, stop! Buy this ticket, and be prepared too get a little messy, and make some whiskey chocolates with Martin.

Daisies is beyond doubt, Belfast’s only artisan Chocolatier, that can stand by their sustainability credentials, their support to local farmers from Madagascar, and who have so much passion for providing real chocolate to locals and tourists.

The pastries, scones, fresh marshmallows, cannolis and the most amazing hot chocolate in the world, coupled with a fantastic staff team; ensures repeat customers and a demand like no other for their products.

You’ll not be disappointed in this cheeky wee chocolate making and whiskey pairing.

3 drams, a famous Hot Chocolates and plenty chocolates to fill you up.

Looking Back

Daisies is not your average chocolatier. Tucked into Belfast city centre, it carries itself with the quiet confidence of a place that knows exactly what it is: an artisan operation with genuine sustainability credentials, deep ties to small-scale farmers as far afield as Madagascar, and a commitment to real chocolate that sets it apart from anything else on the island. The pastries and scones are the stuff of local legend, the fresh marshmallows border on spiritual, and the hot chocolate — well, more on that shortly. Walking through the door for this BWW2025 session, you already knew you were somewhere that took the craft seriously.

Martin led the room with the ease of someone who has spent years coaxing the best from cacao and cocoa butter alike. Attendees gathered around the counter and were walked through the process of making their own whiskey-infused chocolates — tempering, flavouring, and moulding with the kind of patient guidance that meant even those who'd never picked up a palette knife came away with something genuinely beautiful. The seanchas of the craft was there in every step: the why behind the temperature, the where behind the bean, the how behind the pairing with uisce beatha. This wasn't a gimmick. This was education wearing a very delicious disguise.

Three drams anchored the whiskey side of the afternoon, each chosen to complement different flavour profiles in the chocolate work. Without a single branded distillery carrying the event, the focus fell squarely on the pairings themselves — and that freedom allowed Martin to guide the room through textures and tastes that might have been passed over in a more product-led session. Dark fruit against grain sweetness. Bitter cocoa against a honeyed dram. The kind of combinations that make you wonder why you'd ever eaten chocolate and whiskey separately before. For those curious about how food and whiskey interact across other BWW events, the Belfast Boiler Makers session offered its own take on complementary flavours, while the Cocktail Making with Titanic Whiskey at Angel & 2 Bibles showed how whiskey finds its way into a different kind of craft altogether.

Then came the famous hot chocolate. It arrived with the kind of quiet authority that needs no fanfare — thick, dark, and genuinely one of the finest things served anywhere across the week. Paired with cannolis and those aforementioned marshmallows, it turned what might have been a mid-afternoon sugar rush into something approaching a moment of real pleasure. Sláinte to that. The £25 ticket price, in retrospect, felt like a very fine deal for what the room received: a full experience, a practical skill, a guided tasting, and enough chocolate to make the walk home feel very satisfying indeed.

If you're the kind of person who approaches a whiskey festival looking for something beyond the dram — something to do with your hands, something that tells a story about where ingredients come from and what care looks like in practice — then Daisies delivered it with warmth and without pretension. Events like this sit at the heart of what Belfast Whiskey Week does best: finding the places in this tír where craft and community meet, and shining a light on them. Keep an eye on the BWW Whiskey Map to discover more of the venues and makers that make this city's food and drink scene worth celebrating.