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/25/060

Some events sit you down and bring the whiskey to you. This one laced up its boots and took you to it. Marty McAuley of Irish Whiskey Review led Belfast Whiskey Week 2025's bespoke heritage walking tour through the streets and stories of this city, pairing four local drams with an extraordinary cast of food collaborations and the kind of lived-in local knowledge that no guidebook could replicate. Running daily from Room2 Hotel on Queen Street, it was, by any measure, a walk worth taking.

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

The tour assembled each afternoon at 3pm inside Room2 Hotel on Queen Street — BWW2025's hotel partner and a fitting departure point, sitting as it does at the heart of a city that has been making, drinking and arguing about whiskey for well over two centuries. From there, Marty McAuley took his groups out into the tír itself: the laneways, the landmark pubs, the hidden corners and the wide Victorian thoroughfares that hold Belfast's whiskey story in their very stonework. This wasn't a pub crawl with footnotes. It was proper seanchas — the oral tradition of a place, handed down with care and a measure of uisce beatha to help it along.

Marty is a familiar and trusted figure in Irish whiskey circles. As the voice behind Irish Whiskey Review, he brings a depth of knowledge that ranges from the technical to the historical, from mash bills to mythology. His connection to the Friend at Hand gave the tour an additional layer of authenticity — here was someone who doesn't just write about Belfast's whiskey culture but actively inhabits it. That presence translated directly into the quality of the experience. Attendees weren't passive listeners; they were drawn into conversation, into debate, into genuine engagement with what makes the island's whiskey tradition so compelling right now. If you've followed his earlier outings with BWW — including the Irish Whiskey Review: Walking With Marty from a previous festival year — you'll know that this is a guide who improves with every iteration.

The food collaborations were, frankly, a masterstroke. Whiskey donuts. Hand-crafted chocolates. Burgers. Chips. Ice-pops. Each bite was calibrated to accompany one of the four local whiskies on the trail, and the cumulative effect was something genuinely festive — a moveable feast in the oldest sense. The local artisans involved brought their own pride to the table, and that energy was palpable. Belfast has always known how to feed people well; pairing that instinct with serious whiskey made for a combination that was greater than the sum of its parts. Sláinte to everyone who contributed a dough ring or a chocolate square to the cause.

This tour sat comfortably alongside BWW2025's broader programme of walking experiences — a category that has become one of the festival's most distinctive offerings. Where events like the Belfast Walking Tours: Belfast's Public Houses & Art Trail focus on the visual and architectural heritage of the city's drinking culture, and Belfast Hidden Tours: Walking, Whiskies & Whispers lean into the more atmospheric and offbeat, Marty's route carved its own space: part whiskey education, part love letter to Belfast, part sheugh-deep dive into what makes this city's relationship with the water of life so enduring and so particular.

At £30 a head, the Irish Whiskey Review Walking Tour represented exceptional value — not just in the tangible sense of four drams and a feast's worth of food, but in the rarer currency of genuine discovery. Attendees left knowing more about Belfast, more about Irish whiskey, and more about themselves as drinkers and explorers of place. That's the duchas of this festival at its best: the sense that you've been handed something real, something rooted, something that belongs to here. If Marty and the team bring this back in 2026, book early. The shoes will thank you later.