Irish Whiskey Review Walking Tour | 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: 4 min
Ref: BWW/25/220

Some events at Belfast Whiskey Week ask you to sit down and savour. This one asked you to lace up your shoes. Irish Whiskey Review's Marty McAuley led the festival's bespoke whiskey heritage walking tour through the heart of Belfast across nine days in July 2025, weaving together the city's pub culture, distilling history, and living food scene into something that felt less like a ticketed event and more like a generous gift from someone who truly knows this place.

About This Event

We are lucky to have Marty McAuley from Irish Whiskey Review taking our seconded bespoke walking tour of Belfast’s Whiskey Heritage and Whiskey Industry as well as an in depth historical review of Belfast of the years. Marty has wealth of whiskey knowledge and is also one of the best walking tour guides in the city. This combination, and his cameo role at the Friend at Hand has him well placed to deliver a walking tour like no other in the city.
Be prepared for a good walk, great whiskies and delightful snacks, as you visit Belfast Landmarks, pubs and eateries. Your love for whiskey will be enhanced, your love for history will grow, and your love for Belfast will flourish. Sip on 4 local whiskies and devour our food collaborations with local artisans, including; Whiskey Donuts, Chocolates, Burgers, Chips and Ice-Pops.
Meeting Point to Start: Inside Our Hotel Partner; Room2 Hotel, Queen Street, Belfast BT1 6EE at 3pm each day Friday 18th to Saturday 26th July

Looking Back

It began, fittingly, under the roof of Room2 Hotel on Queen Street — Belfast Whiskey Week's hotel partner and a natural threshold between the comfort of the familiar and the promise of something richer beyond the door. From 3pm each afternoon, a small group gathered, introductions were made, and Marty set the tone: this would not be a brisk trot between landmarks. This was seanchas — the living tradition of storytelling — applied to cobblestones, pub snugs, and copper pot stills. The city, for those two or three hours, became a classroom with no walls and considerably better refreshments.

Marty McAuley has earned his reputation honestly. As the voice behind Irish Whiskey Review, he brings a depth of product knowledge that sits comfortably alongside genuine affection for the people and places behind each bottle. His connection to the Friend at Hand gave the tour a lovely insider quality — this was not a recited script but a conversation between a man who knows Belfast's whiskey world intimately and visitors who had come ready to listen. Four local whiskies were poured across the route, each one chosen to illustrate a point about Irish distilling tradition, regional character, or the remarkable revival that has transformed the island's whiskey landscape in recent years. Sláinte was raised more than once.

What lifted this tour above the merely informative was the food. Belfast Whiskey Week has always understood that whiskey does not exist in isolation — it belongs on a table, beside good company and honest flavour — and the collaborations with local artisans here were a genuine delight. Whiskey donuts. Hand-crafted chocolates. Burgers. Chips. Ice-pops. Each stop along the route brought something new, turning the walk into a progressive feast through the city's tír, a reminder that Belfast's food culture has grown into something worth celebrating in its own right. The pairing of a well-chosen dram with an unexpected bite from a local maker is one of the festival's quiet signatures, and this tour wore it well.

For those who had joined similar outings in previous years — Irish Whiskey Review's earlier Walking With Marty, or the parallel routes offered by Belfast Hidden Tours: Walking, Whiskies & Whispers — there was the comfortable pleasure of a tradition deepening. The walking tour format has become one of Belfast Whiskey Week's most reliable joys, and each iteration finds new corners to illuminate. Marty's version, with its particular blend of whiskey expertise and local history, carved out its own distinct identity within that tradition.

At £30 a head, this was one of the festival's more accessible entry points, and it delivered far beyond its price. Guests left the final stop with fuller stomachs, a keener sense of Belfast's whiskey dúchas, and, most likely, a few bottles added to a mental shopping list. If you've never explored the city through the lens of its whiskey heritage, our whiskey map is a fine place to begin planning your next visit — and if Marty is leading the walk, you won't need much more convincing than that.