Hobart Whiskey Tasting – BWW 2021 Introduction | Belfast Whiskey Week

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

Filed: 25 Jul 2021
By: Belfast Whiskey Week
Read: 3 min
Format: Online Tasting
Ref: BWW/21/884

When Belfast Whiskey Week 2021 turned its gaze southward — far southward — to the island of Tasmania, it offered something genuinely rare on the festival calendar: a chance to sit with whisky made at the edge of the world. Session 19 brought Hobart's craft distilling tradition to living rooms and kitchen tables across Ireland and beyond, in the shape of three carefully chosen 50ml samples that asked a simple question — what does uisce beatha taste like when the cool Southern Ocean does the work?

About This Event

This tasting includes 3 x 50ml Samples & Glass and will take place on the 25th @ 12:00.

This tasting comprises of:

Beer Cask Matured Single Malt
Tawny Port Cask Matured Single Malt
Signature Single Malt

Tasting packs will be posted out to you, but may not arrive in time for the tastings. If you wish to collect the pack in Belfast to ensure you have it in time, please contact grace@belfastwhiskeyweek.com after you order.

Looking Back

The format was an Introduction, and that word carried real weight here. For many attendees, this was a first encounter with Tasmanian whisky in any meaningful sense — not just a dram sipped at a bar, but a considered, guided conversation with the spirit. Three samples arrived in the post (or were collected in Belfast for those who wanted to be sure they had the goods in hand by noon on 25th July): a Beer Cask Matured Single Malt, a Tawny Port Cask Matured Single Malt, and the distillery's Signature Single Malt. Three expressions, three very different windows into what this corner of the whisky world is doing.

The Beer Cask expression set the tone with something pleasingly unusual — malt meeting malt, the cereal warmth of a whisky given extra heft by a cask that once held ale. It had the duchas of a craft spirit that knows its own landscape: a little rough-hewn at the edges, but genuine. The Tawny Port Cask, by contrast, was all southern hemisphere sun — rich, vinous, with that particular sweetness that tawny wood draws out of single malt over time. It was the kind of dram that invites you to slow down, and the online format, for all its limitations, at least afforded that luxury.

The Signature expression rounded things out as a kind of statement of intent — a dram that said, plainly, this is who we are. And it held its own comfortably alongside its more elaborately finished siblings. There's a confidence to Tasmanian whisky that has been earned through years of quietly getting on with things while the rest of the world caught up to the idea that great whisky doesn't need to come from Scotland or Ireland to deserve serious attention.

BWW 2021 was shaped, of course, by the constraints of the time — tasting packs posted out, sessions held online, the ritual of the glass raised alone or with whoever happened to be in the room. But Session 19 showed how much that format could still deliver when the liquid was right. For those who wanted to deepen their exploration of the festival's wider Irish programme, events like the Bushmills New Cask Finish Range Introduction and the Bushmills Causeway Collection MasterClass offered a fascinating counterpoint — the Old World and the New, the sheugh and the Southern Ocean, separated by thousands of miles but united by the same obsession with wood, time, and water.

If you're curious about how the full 2021 programme hung together — the range of distilleries, the spread of styles, the sheer ambition of it — the Whiskey Map remains a fine place to get your bearings. The Hobart session was one of those BWW moments that rewarded the curious and sent more than a few attendees down a rabbit hole they hadn't expected to find on a Sunday lunchtime in July. Sláinte mhaith to that.