Irish Single Malts 20Yrs Old | Straight 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: 2 min
Ref: BWW/25/588

Some events dress themselves up in ceremony and occasion — and then there's the An Acquired Taste series. Session 1 of the Irish Single Malts 20 Years Old tasting landed at Belfast Whiskey Week 2025 with exactly the kind of quiet confidence that only truly exceptional whiskey can afford. Held at the beloved John Hewitt on a Monday afternoon in July, this straight whiskey tasting (SWT) made one straightforward promise: sit down, pour, and trust the glass.

About This Event

An Acquired Taste sessions are about getting to try some whiskies with out the fuss. No fuss here. Just Whiskies that you should be able to drink. I mean - there is complete irony in the title! Just trust us - we know whiskey.

A very short tasting of Irish Single Malt Whiskies that are only 20yrs old.

If you don’t like these - then we are F*****

Looking Back

There's a particular kind of joy that comes from a tasting stripped of pretension. No lengthy preambles, no elaborate theatre — just a short flight of Irish single malts, each one carrying two decades of patience in the cask. The An Acquired Taste sessions at Belfast Whiskey Week 2025 were conceived precisely for this: a focused, unhurried encounter with whiskey that has genuinely earned its place in the glass. At £15, the bar to entry was low; the whiskey in those glasses was anything but.

The irony embedded in the name was half the point. These weren't difficult drams demanding some rarified palate — they were twenty-year-old Irish single malts, the kind of whiskey that does the work for you. Rich with the slow alchemy of long maturation, they carried that unmistakable depth you only find when uisce beatha has been left well alone to do what it does best. If you arrived uncertain, you left converted. The hosts were clear-eyed about it: if a room full of people couldn't fall in love with whiskey this good, something had gone very wrong indeed.

The John Hewitt provided its customary sense of ease and welcome — a Belfast institution that understands the value of good conversation alongside good drink. There's a duchas to the place, a sense that it belongs to the city and the city belongs to it, which made it a fitting home for a tasting that was, at its heart, about reconnecting with what Irish whiskey can be at its finest. The afternoon session, kicking off at 3pm, allowed the kind of unhurried attention these malts deserved.

For those who wandered across multiple sessions during the week, this one sat in interesting conversation with some of the festival's more globe-trotting offerings. The Tasmanian Whiskies sessions and World Whiskies: Session 1 invited comparison with the wider craft whiskey renaissance — but there was something grounding about returning to Ireland's long tradition of single malt production and finding it so thoroughly alive in the glass. Twenty years is a commitment, and these drams made you feel every one of them.

If the An Acquired Taste sessions prove anything, it's that the best whiskey education requires very little instruction. You don't need a glossary or a scorecard. You need a good seat, a little time, and something genuinely worth drinking. Session 1 delivered all three in full measure. Sláinte.