Killowen MasterClass | Belfast Whiskey Week 2021

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

Filed: 26 Jul 2021
By: Belfast Whiskey Week
Read: 3 min
Format: Online Tasting
Ref: BWW/21/412

On the evening of 26th July 2021, Belfast Whiskey Week turned its gaze south to the Mournes for one of the festival's most anticipated sessions of the year. Session 51 brought Killowen Distillery to the MasterClass format — six carefully curated 50ml samples, a glass, and a conversation that the Irish whiskey community had quietly been waiting for.

About This Event

This tasting includes 6 x 50ml Samples & Glass and will take place on the 26th @ 21:00.

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

There's a particular kind of excitement that builds around a distillery that the knowledgeable end of the whiskey world has been watching closely without quite saying so out loud. Killowen had earned that quiet reverence well before BWW 2021. Nestled in the shadow of the Mournes — that stretch of tír that has its own particular weight and character — Killowen makes craft Irish single pot still whiskey with the kind of focused intent that stands apart from the noise of the wider industry revival. Bringing them to a full MasterClass slot felt less like a booking and more like a recognition.

Attendees received six 50ml samples ahead of the session, each one chosen to trace the arc of what Killowen does and why it matters. The MasterClass format allowed for something rarer than tasting notes — it allowed for seanchas, the kind of storytelling that gives whiskey its full meaning. Those who sat with these drams that evening weren't just tasting spirit; they were being walked through a philosophy of making. The pot still tradition in Ireland carries its own duchas, its own inherited sense of place and process, and Killowen wears that inheritance with genuine conviction rather than romantic posturing.

For those joining from the USA, Australia, Sweden and beyond, the festival had arranged localised depot collection points to bring down the cost of shipping the sample packs — a practical gesture that reflected BWW's genuine ambition to build a global community around Ulster whiskey culture. The festival has never been merely a local affair, and sessions like this one, with a distillery that speaks to something authentic in the Irish tradition, were exactly the kind of programming that justified that global reach. You can explore the full range of what Killowen produces today at their brand page.

At £95 a session, this was a considered investment — but one that delivered the depth a MasterClass demands. Six samples is space enough to observe a distillery across different expressions, different cask influences, different moments in a whiskey's journey. Killowen's reputation for adventurous cask work — the fortified wine casks, the unusual woods, the willingness to let the spirit develop along unexpected paths — gave the evening genuine range. No two drams told quite the same story, and that variety was itself a kind of argument: that craft, at its best, is restless in the right ways. Slàinte to that.

Session 51 sat comfortably among some of BWW 2021's strongest evening programming. Those who also joined the Session 50: Bushmills Causeway Collection MasterClass the same evening would have experienced a remarkable double-header — one of Ireland's oldest and most storied distilleries set against one of its most compelling new voices. Between the sheugh of history and the momentum of the present, that pairing said something true about where Irish whiskey stands right now. Killowen, for its part, held its own without hesitation.