Echlinville Core Showcase – Belfast Whiskey Week 2021

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

Filed: 31 Jul 2021
By: Belfast Whiskey Week
Read: 3 min
Ref: BWW/21/572

There are moments in a festival that feel less like a tasting and more like a homecoming, and the Echlinville Core Showcase at Belfast Whiskey Week 2021 was very much one of them. On the afternoon of 31st July, with six 50ml samples lined up and ready, attendees settled in to explore the range from Northern Ireland's first new distillery in over 125 years. It was, in every sense, uisce beatha drawn straight from the tír.

About This Event

This tasting includes 6 x 50ml Samples and will take place on the 31st @ 16:00.

For those in the USA, Australia, Sweden, Europe, the Republic of Ireland or Northern Ireland, you will be able to save on delivery costs by having your package to sent to a localised depot for collection. You will be charged a small fee upon collection, but the cost will be much cheaper than having packs delivered to individual addresses. If you would like to avail of this option, please make a note in the Special Instructions box, and we will contact you at a later date to arrange this and refund your delivery charges.

Looking Back

Echlinville Distillery occupies a singular place in the story of Ulster whiskey. Nestled on the Ards Peninsula — that finger of land reaching out into the Irish Sea, where the sheugh between cultures has always been narrow — Echlinville doesn't just make whiskey; it grows the barley that goes into it on the estate itself. That kind of farm-to-glass duchas is rare anywhere in the world, and rarer still in Ireland. When attendees opened that first sample, they weren't just tasting spirit; they were tasting a particular patch of ground.

The Core Showcase format suited Echlinville well. Six expressions, each at 50ml — enough to taste properly, enough to compare, enough to argue over in the best possible way. For those new to the distillery, the range came as a revelation: here was a producer with genuine range and ambition, not content to rest on the novelty of being first. For those already familiar, it was a chance to sit with familiar drams and find something new in them. That's the gift of a well-structured tasting; it slows you down in all the right ways.

Part of what made the 2021 festival so memorable was how it brought together the full seanchas of Irish and Ulster whiskey in a single week. Echlinville shared the programme with some formidable company — including the deep dive offered by the Session 83: Bushmills History MasterClass, which traced centuries of distilling on the north Antrim coast, and the richly focused Session 22: Sexton Deconstruction Showcase, which pulled apart what makes a single malt tick. Against that backdrop, Echlinville's Core Showcase felt like an essential counterpoint — the voice of the new Ulster, confident and clear.

For international attendees, this session was particularly well-served by the festival's localised depot collection system, which meant that participants in the USA, Australia, Europe, Sweden, and the island of Ireland could receive their sample packs without the eye-watering cost of individual international delivery. It was a practical piece of logistics that made a real difference — and it spoke to how seriously Belfast Whiskey Week takes its global community. The festival may be rooted in Belfast, but its welcome stretches well beyond these shores, and in 2021 that mattered more than ever.

Echlinville remains one of BWW's anchor presences, and rightly so. From Distillery Days and warehouse tastings through to cocktail sessions and their celebrated Dunville's Green Label MasterClass, they bring something irreplaceable to the festival: the living proof that great Ulster whiskey is being made right now, in the soil of this place. If you'd like to explore what they produce, you can find the full range in our Echlinville collection, or trace their place in the wider landscape of Irish distilling on the Whiskey Map. Sláinte mhaith.