Irish v Scottish 12yr+ Showcase | Belfast Whiskey Week 2021

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
Ref: BWW/21/940

Few questions in the world of uisce beatha stir as much spirited debate as the one at the heart of Session 43 of Belfast Whiskey Week 2021: Irish or Scotch? On the afternoon of Sunday the 25th of July, whiskey lovers from Belfast to Brisbane settled in with six carefully chosen 50ml samples and set about answering that ancient question for themselves. It was, by any measure, a grand afternoon's work.

About This Event

This tasting includes 6 x 50ml Samples and will take place on the 25th @ 13:00.

For those in the USA, Australia, Sweden, Europe, the Republic of Ireland or Northern Ireland, you will be able to save on delivery costs by having your package to sent to a localised depot for collection. You will be charged a small fee upon collection, but the cost will be much cheaper than having packs delivered to individual addresses. If you would like to avail of this option, please make a note in the Special Instructions box, and we will contact you at a later date to arrange this and refund your delivery charges.

Looking Back

The premise was elegant in its simplicity — set mature Irish and Scottish single malts of twelve years and above side by side, pour honestly, and let the glass do the talking. No allegiances declared at the door, no tribal loyalty required. What the format delivered was something richer than a competition: it was a conversation between two traditions, two landscapes, two ways of coaxing meaning from grain and oak and time. The sheugh between Ireland and Scotland has never felt so narrow as when both countries are speaking through whiskey.

With six 50ml samples in hand, participants were guided through a tasting that rewarded attention. Aged expressions tend to carry what the Irish call duchas — an inherited character, a sense of place worn into the spirit itself. The older a whiskey sits in wood, the more it accumulates story, and the whiskies chosen for this showcase had plenty to tell. Irish expressions brought their signature approachability — that honeyed, triple-distilled smoothness that makes a twelve-year-old Irish malt feel almost conversational — while the Scottish contingent arrived with more austere ambitions: coastal brine, heathered hills, and that particular dryness that demands you slow down and listen. Neither tradition won. Both traditions prevailed.

What made the session especially fitting in the context of BWW 2021 was how it sat within a broader festival programme deeply rooted in the Irish whiskey story. Those who spent the week exploring the history of Bushmills in Session 83 or deepening their knowledge through the Causeway Collection MasterClass would have arrived at Session 43 with a sharpened palate and a sense of the Irish tradition's depth. The head-to-head format rewarded exactly that kind of accumulated knowledge — a reminder that seanchas, the living lore passed down through experience and story, matters as much in a tasting room as it does around a fire.

One of the quiet pleasures of Belfast Whiskey Week 2021 was its genuinely international reach. Participants from the USA, Australia, Sweden, and across Europe joined those closer to home, with depot collection options making the logistics of receiving sample packs far more manageable. There was something quietly moving about that — a room, or rather many rooms across many time zones, united by the same six drams at the same hour. The tír may have been different for everyone, but the whiskey was shared. That felt very much in the spirit of what Belfast Whiskey Week has always tried to do: bring the world into Ulster's conversation about whiskey, and send it back a little wiser.

If Session 43 left you wanting to explore the wider Irish whiskey landscape on your own terms, our Whiskey Map is a fine place to start — a guide to the distilleries, styles, and stories that make this island's spirit so endlessly worth returning to. Sláinte mhaith.