Japanese & Taiwanese Whiskies Tasting | Belfast Whiskey Week 2024

Name: Belfast Whiskey Week 2026
Start: 2026-07-24
End: 2026-08-01
Location: Belfast

Filed: 25 Jul 2024
By: Belfast Whiskey Week
Read: 3 min
Ref: BWW/24/716

On a warm July evening in 2024, the Committee Room of the Ulster Sports Club became a portal to the Far East. Session 69 of Belfast Whiskey Week — New World: Japanese & Taiwanese Whiskies — gathered a room full of the curious and the converted for a specialist tasting that asked a simple, thrilling question: what exactly is all the fuss about? With Marty McAuley at the helm, attendees were about to find out.

About This Event

A fantastic opportunity to taste whiskies from both Japan & Taiwan with our very own Marty McAuley. This specialist tasting explores the explosion in whisky dominance from this side of the globe, taking both Scottish and Irish prizes with them on their journey. Taste is important. Let's see what all the fuss is about…

Ulster Sports Club (Committee Room)

Looking Back

There's a particular kind of quiet that settles over a room when a pour lands and nobody reaches for their glass straight away. That moment of anticipation — nose first, then instinct — was exactly what Marty McAuley cultivated from the very start of this session. As one of Belfast Whiskey Week's most trusted guides through the world of uisce beatha, Marty brought both scholarly depth and genuine enthusiasm to a subject that has, in truth, reshaped the global whisky conversation over the past two decades. This was no dry lecture. It was a shared act of discovery.

The session charted the remarkable rise of Japanese and Taiwanese distilleries — producers who began, in many cases, by studying Scottish and Irish traditions with forensic attention, then forged something entirely their own. The fact that these newcomers have taken home Scottish and Irish awards along the way wasn't presented as provocation but as evidence of craft transcending geography. Whisky, as this room was reminded, belongs to no single tír. The traditions may have roots in rain-soaked islands closer to home, but the duchas of the dram travels wherever the skill and the intention are genuine.

Taiwan's climate — its fierce heat and humidity — accelerates maturation in ways that would confound a distiller in Antrim or Speyside, pulling colour and character from the cask at a pace that demands its own discipline. Japan, meanwhile, brings a philosophy of refinement and restraint that produces whiskies of extraordinary delicacy alongside bold, layered expressions that reward patience. Marty guided the group through these distinctions with care, making the unfamiliar feel approachable without ever dumbing it down. For those who'd spent time at sessions like the Bushmills Causeway Collection MasterClass earlier in the festival, the contrast in regional character was particularly striking — a reminder of how profoundly place shapes spirit.

The Committee Room at the Ulster Sports Club proved a fine setting for the occasion — intimate enough for conversation to flow between pours, but with enough gravitas to honour the seriousness of what was in the glass. At £35, this was a session that offered genuine value: not just the liquid, but the context, the seanchas of each distillery, and the kind of guided exploration that turns a tasting into a memory. Those who had also explored the craft of Irish expression through events like the Sexton Deconstruction Showcase or the Bushmills History MasterClass will have found this session a natural and revelatory counterpoint — a reminder that whisky's story is still being written, and that some of its most exciting chapters are unfolding a long way from these shores.

Session 69 was, in the end, exactly what a specialist tasting should be: convivial, enlightening, and — sláinte — delicious. If Japanese and Taiwanese whisky had any doubters in that room when the evening began, they were considerably fewer by the time the last dram was drained.