Echlinville Warehouse MasterClass – 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/21/108

On the evening of 31st July 2021, Belfast Whiskey Week's Session 88 brought participants face-to-face with one of Northern Ireland's most compelling whiskey stories: the Echlinville Distillery Warehouse MasterClass. Six fifty-millilitre samples, one glass, and a distillery whose roots reach deep into the tír of the Ards Peninsula — it was an evening that rewarded anyone prepared to give it their full attention.

About This Event

This tasting includes 6 x 50ml Samples & Glass and will take place on the 31st @ 20:30.

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

There is something quietly significant about Echlinville. When it was granted its distilling licence, it became the first new distillery to open in Northern Ireland for more than 125 years — a fact that carries real weight when you're sitting down with a flight of its whiskeys and thinking about the generations of silence that preceded them. That duchas, that inherited sense of belonging to a place and its traditions, runs through everything Echlinville produces. The distillery grows its own barley on the estate, the land doing what land on the Ards Peninsula has always done, quietly and without ceremony. You could taste that rootedness in the glass.

The MasterClass format suited Echlinville well. This wasn't a breezy introduction — it was the kind of deep, considered tasting that rewards patience and curiosity. Six samples gave participants room to move through the range with genuine attention rather than a quick nod to each dram. The warehouse dimension added a layer of seanchas, that oral tradition of story and context, that lifted the evening beyond a straight product presentation. Echlinville's people spoke with the authority of those who have watched their spirit mature from new-make to something worth bottling, and that knowledge came through in every pour.

Part of what makes Echlinville such a natural fit for Belfast Whiskey Week is the distillery's willingness to open itself up — not just its bottles but its process, its thinking, its place on the landscape. This warehouse session sat comfortably alongside the distillery's other festival appearances, from cocktail sessions to spirit tastings to its Dunville's Green Label showcases, all of which have made Echlinville one of the festival's cornerstone brands. Attendees who had followed the full programme would have arrived at Session 88 already primed; those coming to Echlinville fresh found themselves quickly absorbed.

The logistical care taken with this session was worth noting too. Sample packs were made available for collection at localised depots across the USA, Australia, Sweden, Europe, and the island of Ireland — a small but meaningful gesture that reflected the genuinely international reach of BWW 2021. Whiskey brings people together across considerable distances, and the festival's organisers clearly understood that the Ards Peninsula deserved an audience wider than those who could point to it on a map. If you're curious about the broader geography of Irish whiskey and where Echlinville sits within it, the BWW Whiskey Map is a good place to start.

Taken alongside other MasterClass sessions from that year's programme — including the richly historical Bushmills History MasterClass — Session 88 confirmed that the long-form, warehouse-rooted tasting is one of the festival's most reliable formats. It demands something of the participant, and it gives something back. Sláinte to everyone who raised a glass on that July evening, wherever in the world they happened to be sitting.