European Whiskies Tasting Session – Belfast Whiskey Week 2024

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

Filed: 20 Jul 2024
By: Belfast Whiskey Week
Read: 3 min
Ref: BWW/24/988

On a July evening in 2024, the Ulster Sports Club played host to one of the most quietly radical sessions of that year's festival: 21: Exploring European Whiskies, a specialist tasting that asked attendees to set aside their assumptions and follow the uisce beatha wherever it led — across the sheugh and far beyond. This was no ordinary dram; it was a passport stamped with the names of distilleries from Sweden, Holland, France, and a clutch of other nations that have spent the past decade quietly, stubbornly, earning their place at the table.

About This Event

Time to look at the most promising whiskies emerging across Europe, with plenty to choose from. This late session will give us the opportunity to savour some whiskies from Sweden, Holland, France to name but a few counties that have been producing whiskies for the past 10 years. Be prepared to change your perceptions.

Looking Back

There is a particular pleasure in watching a room of seasoned whiskey drinkers recalibrate. That was the quiet magic of Session 21, a late-night tasting that carried the kind of energy that only comes when a crowd suspects it is about to have its thinking rearranged. The Ulster Sports Club — a venue that carries its own seanchas, its own sense of Belfast belonging — provided the perfect backdrop: familiar enough to feel at ease, yet open enough in spirit to welcome the unfamiliar.

The session drew on a category that is still finding its full voice in the wider whiskey conversation. European whisky — and here we use the broad spelling deliberately, because these producers mostly do — has been building quietly for a decade or more. Sweden's Mackmyra and Box distilleries have long been flagbearers, while French producers in regions more famous for Cognac and Armagnac have brought an entirely different understanding of wood and time to their craft. Dutch distillers, too, have leaned into local grain traditions and innovative maturation to produce spirits of genuine character. The session brought several of these together in one room, and the contrast in style, philosophy, and sheer ambition was striking. Attendees weren't just tasting whisky; they were tasting different answers to the same essential question: what does this place, this tír, taste like?

What made the evening land so well was the framing. This wasn't presented as a curiosity sideshow to the main Irish and Scotch programme — it was positioned as a genuine frontier. The duchas of whiskey-making, that deep inheritance of knowledge and instinct, is not the exclusive property of the island of Ireland or the Scottish Highlands. It travels. It takes root. And in the hands of distillers who have studied their craft seriously and then applied it to their own landscapes and climates, it produces something worth paying attention to. Attendees who arrived sceptical were, by the end, asking questions rather than raising objections — always the sign of a session that has done its job. If you want to understand where Ireland and Scotland's whiskeys sit in the broader world of craft spirit, events like this provide essential context; our Whiskey Map offers a useful way to explore that geography further.

It is worth noting that Session 21 sat within a festival programme that also celebrated the deep roots of Irish whiskey with considerable depth and affection. The contrast was instructive. While attendees at sessions like the Bushmills History MasterClass were tracing centuries of Ulster distilling tradition, Session 21 was asking what happens when that same spirit of enquiry — that same restlessness — is applied somewhere entirely new. Both conversations matter, and Belfast Whiskey Week 2024 was richer for holding them in the same week, sometimes on the same evening.

At £35, this was among the more accessible specialist tastings on the 2024 programme, and it delivered well above its weight. If the aim was to change perceptions — as the session description frankly promised — then it succeeded. Sláinte to the producers who made the drams, and to the curious souls who showed up late on a July night ready to be surprised.