Glens of Antrim Lír Whiskey Tasting – 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: 3 min
Ref: BWW/25/780

On a bright Friday afternoon in July 2025, the Duke of York welcomed a gathering of curious drams-people for one of Belfast Whiskey Week's most grounded and genuine sessions: a straight whiskey tasting with Glens of Antrim Distillery, built around their Lír Irish Whiskey range. For £15, guests got something rarer than a bargain — a genuine sense of place, poured into a glass.

About This Event

Join us for a few drams and a whiskey infused donut with the Glens of Antrim Distillery to explore their Lír Irish Whiskey. This traditional family run business has branched out from producing multi-award winning and tasty potatoes, to exceptional local crisps and now is in building mode to create a stunning Distillery up on the Antrim coast overlooking Scotland and the Islands.

The Lír whiskey range provides an opportunity to taste perfect cask management and blending along with a devotion to finding balance in an industry with lots of choice. The use of various cask types, including Pedro Ximenes & Oloroso Sherry Casks allow the delightful notes of chocolate and ginger spice to compliment the vanilla and dried fruits.

We look forward to you joining us for a great taste of great local produce.

Looking Back

There's a word in Irish — dúchas — that speaks to belonging, to the inherited character of a landscape and the people who come from it. It's not a word you'd usually reach for in a tasting note, but it kept coming to mind during this session. Glens of Antrim Distillery isn't a finished distillery yet; it's a project still taking shape on the Antrim coast, high above the sheugh between Ulster and Scotland. And yet the Lír range they brought to the Duke of York that afternoon carried the full weight of that ambition and that place.

The session opened with context, and that was the right call. The Glens of Antrim story is an unlikely and thoroughly compelling one — a family-run business that built its reputation on multi-award-winning potatoes and local crisps before turning its attention to the uisce beatha. That agricultural rootedness, that attention to provenance and quality at every stage, came through not just in the talk but in the whiskey itself. There was nothing rushed or overreached about what was in the glass. The Lír range showed a distillery in the making that already understands cask management with real maturity.

The whiskies themselves were the heart of it. Pedro Ximenes and Oloroso sherry casks had done their work generously — notes of dark chocolate, ginger spice, vanilla, and dried fruits moved through each dram with the kind of balance that doesn't happen by accident. This was blending and cask selection carried out with devotion rather than formula, and the room noticed. Conversation flowed easily between pours, the seanchas of the brand mixing naturally with the shared vocabulary of people who love good whiskey. And then there was the whiskey-infused donut. A small touch, perhaps, but a delightful one — and entirely in keeping with a brand that takes food and flavour seriously at every turn.

Glens of Antrim has become a real presence across Belfast Whiskey Week's programme. This tasting sat alongside their Taste the Festival @ Daisies collaboration and was one of several appearances they've made across consecutive festivals — including showcase sessions in 2023 and 2024 — each one building the story a little further. The brand brings North Coast character to the city in a way that feels earned rather than performed.

The Duke of York, tucked into Commercial Court, remains one of Belfast's most characterful rooms for a tasting — low ceilings, good company, the kind of place where an afternoon dram feels entirely natural. On 18th July 2025, it was the right venue for a brand that is, in many ways, still becoming what it will be. The distillery on the cliff above the sea is still rising. But the whiskey is already worth your time. Sláinte.