Glens of Antrim Distillery Showcase | Belfast Whiskey Week 2023

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

Filed: 15 Jul 2023
By: Belfast Whiskey Week
Read: 5 min
Ref: BWW/23/836

There are places in Ulster where the land itself seems to insist on quality — where the soil, the rain, and the salt air off the North Channel conspire to produce something worth paying attention to. The Glens of Antrim are exactly such a place, and when Glens of Antrim Distillery took over The Jailhouse on Friday 21st October 2023 for their BWW showcase, they brought a good measure of that landscape with them. This was one of those rare festival sessions where the story behind the dram was every bit as compelling as what was in the glass.

About This Event

Glens of Antrim Distillery welcome you to The Jailhouse, where you will be treated to a Showcase of their fantastic spirits and listen to the story of Lír Whiskey, while tasting some great local produce. Glens of Antrim Distillery are a family run Irish Whiskey brand with a pedigree in local business based up in Cushendall. The McKillop family founded Glens of Antrim Potatoes, and for the past three generations have successfully fed our families and neighbours with quality produce, including their famous Glens of Antrim Crisps that are a must have snack. This new venture into developing a Whiskey Distillery is not off-piste, in fact, it is a natural progression for a family dedicated to producing high quality product, providing local employment, caring about our environment and looking to build on the valuable and worthy tourism sector that the Glens needs to survive. Expect to be entertained, filled, and be merry with the McKillop family, as they bring a hearty showcase of what they know they are good at!

Timeslot: 3pm-6pm

Start Time: 3pm

Duration: 3hrs

Venue: The Jailhouse - Henry's

Drinks: 3 Drinks

Type: Showcase

Disclaimers

Please note that individual dietary requirements are not being catered for with any food at this event.

Each Brand/Distillery and Collaborative Partner have agreed to our Min/Max Pour Policy. Please Respect this, and enjoy your festival responsibly. Festival Participants who are deemed to be too inebriated, or are not respecting themselves, will not be permitted into events and venues. ALL Hosts/Ushers/Collaborators and Venue Staff have the right to refuse participants without question and recourse. Please Drink Responsibly.

All events are only available to those 18 years old and over. Do not purchase tickets if you are under the age of 18. Be prepared to produce ID if required. Venue staff & ushers may ask you to provide ID when showing your valid tickets. You may be refused enter to events if you can’t prove your age.

Some venues may change, if they do, you will be notified. All events are subject to changes out of the control of the festival organisers.

Any issues, please contact us @belfastwhiskeyweek on socials, or via email on marketing@belfastwhiskeyweek.com or 07773675179 (8am-8pm) to discuss.

NO Refunds will be given. Please only buy tickets if you are prepared to attend the event. Tickets are transferable. If you are going to transfer tickets please email marketing@belfastwhiskeyweek.com

Looking Back

The McKillop family are not strangers to feeding people well. For three generations, Glens of Antrim Potatoes has been a fixture in Ulster kitchens, and their crisps — those quietly addictive, proudly local snacks — have a loyalty bordering on devotion among anyone raised within reach of the North Coast. So when the family announced a move into Irish whiskey, sceptics were few. This was a family whose duchas — whose rootedness in place and in craft — was already well established. The uisce beatha felt like a natural continuation of the same instinct: take what the land gives you, and make it exceptional.

The showcase at The Jailhouse ran from three in the afternoon until six, and it settled into exactly the kind of easy, generous rhythm you'd hope for from a family who know how to look after people. Guests were welcomed into the story of Lír Whiskey — named for the ancient king of the Tuatha Dé Danann, whose children were transformed into swans and spent centuries drifting the waters of the north, including Lough Derravaragh and the Straits of Moyle, just off that same Antrim coastline. It is the sort of seanchas that earns its place in a dram's identity rather than simply borrowing mythology for decoration. Three pours accompanied the session, alongside local produce that spoke clearly of the McKillops' wider commitment to the tír they come from.

What made this showcase linger in the memory was the warmth of its delivery. There was nothing corporate about the afternoon — no glossy slides, no rehearsed patter. The McKillop family presence gave the event the texture of something closer to an open house than a brand presentation, and that honesty was refreshing in a festival programme that contained plenty of polished excellence. If you were in the room for this one, you likely left with a genuine sense of where Glens of Antrim Distillery is heading and why it matters — not just commercially, but to the community of Cushendall and the wider tourism economy of the glens. Attendees of Blaiseadh Uisce Bheatha — the Irish-language tasting session that same week would have recognised a similar spirit: whiskey as something embedded in culture and place, not merely a product.

Glens of Antrim Distillery is still a young operation in whiskey terms, but the foundations are anything but shaky. The family's record in food production — rigorous, local, multigenerational — gives Lír Whiskey a credibility that takes most new distilleries years to build. The ambition here is clear: to anchor a distillery to one of Ulster's most remarkable landscapes and draw visitors to a part of the world that deserves far more than it typically gets from the tourism conversation. For those who want to explore their releases further, the Glens of Antrim Distillery collection is the place to start. And if the Friday showcase left you hungry to map the broader world of Irish and Scots whiskey that BWW 2023 laid out, the Whiskey Map gives a fine sense of just how wide the festival's reach extends — from the Antrim glens to the distilleries of Tasmania and beyond.

Sláinte mhath to the McKillops. The sheugh between potato field and still house, it turns out, is not so wide after all.