Dragon Claw x Oh Donuts Tasting Session | Belfast Whiskey Week 2024

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

Filed: 25 Jul 2024
By: Belfast Whiskey Week
Read: 3 min
Ref: BWW/24/412

Some pairings make immediate, obvious sense — a peated dram beside a winter fire, say, or a smooth single malt with a slow afternoon. And then there's the Belfast Whiskey Week Taste the Festival collaboration with Oh Donuts, which shouldn't work quite as well as it does, and yet somehow works brilliantly. Session 4 of this returning favourite brought together Dragon Claw, R&R Distillery, and Powers alongside three bespoke donuts crafted to match — and the Duke of York was, predictably, delighted to host the chaos.

About This Event

Back by popular demand! Our collaboration with Oh Donuts is just so much fun! 3 bespoke donuts with their respective whiskies for you to sample. Session 4 includes: Dragon Claw, R&R Distillery & Powers. You'll not go hungry - or thirsty for that matter.

Looking Back

This was the fourth session of a collaboration that had already, by this point, earned its place in the informal seanchas of Belfast Whiskey Week — one of those events people mention when they're trying to explain to an uninitiated friend what BWW is actually like. Not every festival moment needs to be reverential. Sometimes the uisce beatha deserves a little irreverence, a dusting of icing sugar, and a queue of genuinely excited people wondering which donut goes with which dram.

Dragon Claw was the wildcard presence that gave Session 4 its particular edge. The County Down brand selects, finishes, and bottles with a point of view — bold, fiery, and constitutionally uninterested in playing it safe. That energy suited the format perfectly. Where a more conservative whiskey might have sat politely alongside its paired donut, Dragon Claw showed up like it had something to prove, and the pairing leaned into that. Attendees who'd encountered the brand before at BWW's more unconventional corners — the Whiskey and Poker Nights, the frankly legendary Dungeons & Dragons Shot-A-Thon — would have recognised that same instinct: whiskey as experience, not just liquid in a glass.

R&R Distillery and Powers brought balance and range to the lineup. Powers, one of Irish whiskey's most enduring and underappreciated names, offered the kind of warm, spiced familiarity that grounds a tasting like this — and paired beautifully with whatever Oh Donuts had devised to match it. The three pairings together told a neat story about the breadth of what Irish and Irish-adjacent whiskey can be: bold and envelope-pushing, craft and considered, classic and reliable. All of it good. All of it gone rather quickly.

The format itself — three whiskies, three donuts, £15, no lectures — is a reminder that accessibility matters in whiskey culture. Not every session at Belfast Whiskey Week needs to be a deep dive into distillation science, and the Taste the Festival series has always understood that. For newcomers, it was a gentle, delicious entry point. For seasoned festival-goers, it was exactly the kind of palate-loosening mid-afternoon session that makes the more structured tastings land better afterwards. If you wanted something more in-depth around this time, the Bushmills Cask Strength Mini-MasterClass or the Bushmills Causeway Collection MasterClass offered that rigour — but Session 62 wasn't trying to be those things, and was all the better for it.

Back by popular demand, the event returned in 2024 because the first time around it earned its return. That's the simplest endorsement there is. You can explore more from Dragon Claw — a brand worth watching closely as Ulster's whiskey scene continues to find its voice — over at their brand collection, and if you're curious about where Dragon Claw fits in the wider landscape of Irish and Northern Irish whiskey production, the BWW Whiskey Map is a good place to orient yourself. Sláinte to Oh Donuts, to Dragon Claw, and to everyone who left Session 4 with icing sugar on their lapels and a very satisfied expression.