Irish Single Pot Still 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/25/484

Some sessions at Belfast Whiskey Week arrive with fanfare, elaborate preambles, and lengthy tasting notes read aloud with theatrical gravitas. Session 3 of An Acquired Taste was emphatically not one of those sessions — and all the better for it. On the afternoon of 23rd July 2025, a room of whiskey lovers settled into the John Hewitt Bar for a tight, focused pour-through of Irish Single Pot Still whiskies: the style that, more than any other, sits at the very heart of this island's uisce beatha tradition.

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 PotStill Whiskies that are meant to savoured

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

Looking Back

The title An Acquired Taste has always carried a wink in it. Because here's the thing — Irish Single Pot Still isn't really an acquired taste at all. It's the taste you were always meant to find. Spiced, creamy, weighty with that signature mix of malted and unmalted barley, these are whiskies that carry the duchas of the island in every glass. The framing of the series — unpretentious, direct, a little self-deprecating — suited the style perfectly. No fuss. Just whiskey. Just sit down, lift the glass, and pay attention.

The John Hewitt is exactly the right room for this kind of afternoon. A Belfast institution on Donegall Street, it carries its own seanchas — trade union roots, literary nights, good conversation held in high regard. On a Wednesday afternoon in July, with the city humming outside, it offered just enough shelter from the world to let the whiskey do its work. The session ran short by design, which concentrated the mind rather than scattering it. Attendees weren't asked to endure a marathon — they were asked to be present, and to taste properly.

What landed, for most in the room, was the reminder of just how singular the Single Pot Still style remains. It isn't Scotch. It isn't American. It's something that grew out of this tír, out of peculiar taxation histories and the stubbornness of Irish distillers who refused to let unmalted barley disappear from the mash bill. The result is a spice — a peppery, oily richness — that you simply don't find elsewhere. These weren't entry-level drams offered out of obligation. They were whiskies selected with the quiet confidence of people who know exactly what they're putting in front of you. As the session title put it: if you don't like these, we're in trouble.

The An Acquired Taste series sat alongside a broader programme of exploratory tastings during World Whiskies: Session 1 and the much-talked-about Tasmanian explorations — but Session 3 felt like a deliberate act of homecoming. When the wider whiskey world is pulling attention toward every corner of the globe, there's something grounding about a room of people pausing to honour what this island does, and has always done, best. Sláinte to that.

If you're curious about where events like this sit across the full festival programme, the Belfast Whiskey Week Whiskey Map is worth exploring — it traces the spread of styles, venues, and producers that made BWW25 the event it was. And if the Single Pot Still session has you thinking about the wider Irish whiskey conversation, keep an eye on Glens of Antrim: Lir Whiskey Tasting, which offered its own distinctive chapter in the local story. The sheugh between Irish and Ulster whiskey tradition is narrower than some would have you believe — afternoons like this one proved it.