English Whiskey Tasting – West Midlands Distillery | 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: 2 min
Ref: BWW/25/308

On a bright July Saturday in 2025, the Duke of York — one of Belfast's most storied public houses — welcomed something a little unexpected to its tiled snugs and well-worn bar: a glass-by-glass exploration of English whiskey, courtesy of West Midlands Distillery. Event 109 of Belfast Whiskey Week 2025 was a Straight Whiskey Tasting that asked a simple but genuinely interesting question — what does England's heartland taste like in a dram?

Looking Back

England's whiskey scene has grown quietly but with real conviction over the past decade, and West Midlands Distillery sits at an intriguing point in that story. Rooted in the industrial and agricultural landscape of the English Midlands, the distillery draws on a tir — a sense of place — that is distinct from anything the Scottish Highlands, the Irish countryside, or even the bourbon belt of Kentucky can offer. Bringing that identity to Belfast was a bold move, and it paid off.

The session kicked off at quarter past one, a civilised hour for a Saturday that gave attendees the pleasant sense of a long afternoon ahead. The Duke of York, with its Victorian bones and its walls layered in seanchas — in the stories and ephemera of a century of Belfast life — turned out to be the perfect setting. There is something fitting about examining an emerging whiskey tradition in a room that has itself witnessed so much history. The contrast between the old stones of North Street and the relative youth of English single malt made for an quietly electric backdrop.

West Midlands Distillery presented a focused flight that allowed each expression to speak without crowding the palate. Guests moved through the whiskies at a considered pace, guided by knowledgeable pours and the kind of unhurried conversation that a well-run Straight Whiskey Tasting makes possible. For the uninitiated, English whiskey can be a revelation — less freighted with expectation than Irish or Scotch, and often showing a freshness and grain character that reflects both newer distilling infrastructure and the particular cereal character of English barley. West Midlands Distillery leans into that identity rather than imitating its neighbours, and the room seemed to appreciate the honesty of that approach.

For those who attended the broader programme, Event 109 sat naturally alongside the festival's wider world whiskey strand. Sessions like World Whiskies: Session 1 and Tasmanian Whiskies: Session 1 were asking similar questions about place and character — about what uisce beatha means when it is made far from the traditions that named it. English whiskey is, in that sense, part of a genuinely global conversation, and Belfast Whiskey Week 2025 was all the richer for staging it. If you are curious about where else the festival took its guests, the Whiskey Map gives a fine overview of the distilling world covered across the week.

At £15 a ticket, Event 109 was accessible without feeling throwaway — a fair price for an afternoon that offered genuine discovery. English whiskey will not be a novelty for much longer; distilleries like West Midlands are producing work serious enough to stand alongside established names. Those who pulled up a stool in the Duke of York that Saturday afternoon got to be early witnesses to that. Sláinte mhaith to them.