Hinch Distillery Cocktail Making | 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/25/692

There are few better ways to spend a Saturday afternoon in Belfast than with a cocktail shaker in hand and a County Down distillery guiding you through it. On 19th July 2025, the cocktail making session with Hinch Distillery at Angel & 2 Bibles brought together the craft of the mixologist and the character of one of Northern Ireland's most exciting modern whiskey operations — and the result was exactly as good as it sounds.

About This Event

Everyday during the Festival, we have partnered with one of Belfast’s finest Cocktail lounges: Angel & 2 Bibles. We have built up a great relationship with this quirky and nostalgic venue of the past 4 years, and hosted multiple parties, tastings, fine-dining experiences, as well as the best cocktail experiences in Belfast.

This year we are challenging the staff, the venue, and you to deliver a unique cocktail master class everyday during the festival.

Each session will have three unique drinks, using Whiskies and possibly some other spirits from our local distilleries such as Poitín or Gin or Vodka or even Rum.

You’ll get to make the cocktails, after our well versed and experienced mixologists walk you through the step by step process of making bespoke Cocktails designed for the festival.

This Session will use 2 Whiskies and 1 Gin from the Hinch Distillery's range.

Looking Back

Angel & 2 Bibles has become something of a spiritual home for Belfast Whiskey Week's more playful side. Tucked into the city with its peculiar charm — nostalgic fixtures, a personality all its own — the venue has hosted the festival across four years of parties, tastings, and fine-dining evenings. For BWW 2025, it stepped up again as the dedicated cocktail stage, running daily masterclasses throughout the week. The Saturday slot belonged to Hinch, and the room was ready for it.

The session centred on three bespoke cocktails designed specifically for the festival — two built around whiskies from Hinch Distillery's range, and one showcasing their gin. Hinch sits on a sprawling County Down estate and has built a serious reputation since it opened its doors, combining traditional Irish whiskey craft with a modern sensibility that makes it well suited to the cocktail format. These aren't whiskies that demand to be locked behind glass — they're spirits that want to be used, experimented with, and enjoyed.

The mixologists leading the class were well versed and clearly at ease with both the spirits and the crowd. Each drink was introduced with context — where it came from, why the combination worked, what flavours to chase — before guests got their hands on the shakers themselves. There's something genuinely satisfying about making a well-balanced cocktail under the guidance of someone who actually knows what they're doing, and the step-by-step format made it accessible without ever feeling remedial. First-timers left confident. Seasoned drinkers left with new ideas.

Hinch is a BWW staple for good reason. Their presence across the festival in 2025 was substantial — from the dedicated Hinch Distillery Day out on the estate, to appearances in tasting and pairing formats throughout the week. If you wanted a fuller picture of what Hinch is doing with whiskey right now, the cocktail session at Angel & 2 Bibles was a fine starting point: informal, creative, and genuinely delicious. If the cocktail format appealed but you hadn't yet tried a session, the Douglas Laing cocktail making class offered a similarly hands-on experience with a different set of spirits to explore.

At £25, this was one of the festival's stronger value propositions — three drinks made by your own hand, a story behind each one, and an hour or two in one of Belfast's most characterful rooms. That's the uisce beatha working exactly as it should: bringing people together, sharing something worth knowing, and sending everyone home a little warmer than they arrived. Sláinte.