Killowen Wine & Fortified Cask Tasting – 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: 3 min
Ref: BWW/25/148

On a warm July evening in Belfast City Centre, something quietly extraordinary unfolded inside Neighbourhood Cafe. Killowen Distillery — those meticulous, mischievous craft distillers nestled in the shadow of the Mournes — took over the room for an evening of wine and fortified wine cask expressions, paired with desserts that had no business being as good as they were. This was Event 79 of Belfast Whiskey Week 2025, and it was, in the truest sense of the word, a belter.

About This Event

Belfast Whiskey Week is Collaborating with Neighbourhood Cafe each day during the Festival. This is an unprecedented step for both BWW and Neighbourhood; with each event being completely different! Keep a lookout for our other collaborations.

Killowen - Wine & Fortified Wine Cask: A perfect way to experience Killowen and their madness; in the tranquil surroundings of Neighbourhood Cafe, while tasting some impeccable desserts. Killowen is constantly experimenting and providing a fantastic array of different mashbills, cask experimentation and new whiskies to taste. I’m looking forward to this tasting - as it looks to blow my mind!

Looking Back

There is a certain kind of distillery that earns its reputation not through volume or legacy, but through sheer, restless curiosity. Killowen is that distillery. Up in the Mournes, they have been quietly and methodically pulling apart the rulebook of Irish single pot still whiskey — different mashbills, unexpected cask choices, small batches that appear and disappear before most people even hear about them. The uisce beatha community in Ireland has been tracking their every move with good reason, and this evening gave Belfast whiskey lovers a rare chance to sit with that work and truly understand it.

Neighbourhood Cafe provided the ideal setting — intimate, unhurried, the kind of place where a conversation about cask maturation can stretch comfortably across two hours without anyone feeling restless. The collaboration between BWW and Neighbourhood across the 2025 festival was one of the most inventive programming decisions of the week, and the Copeland Spirits takeover and the Bourbon & Cream evening proved just as distinctive in their own right. But there was something particular about handing Neighbourhood's space over to Killowen: the venue's calm, considered atmosphere felt like a natural companion to whiskeys that reward patience and attention.

The casks in focus — wine and fortified wine — offered a fascinating thread to follow across the tasting. Attendees moved through expressions that showed how profoundly cask influence can shift the character of Killowen's pot still spirit: from lighter, floral wine-finished drams with a honeyed lift, to deeper, richer fortified cask expressions carrying notes of dried fruit, dark chocolate and something almost port-like in their density. The desserts were chosen with evident care, each course playing off the whiskey rather than competing with it — a pairing that, at its best moments, felt like one complete thing rather than two separate pleasures.

What came through clearly over the course of the evening was the coherence behind Killowen's experimentation. This is not cask roulette. There is genuine seanchas — knowledge, craft tradition — underpinning every choice they make, and the team conveyed that with warmth and without any trace of pretension. Guests who arrived curious left with a far deeper sense of what this distillery is building, dram by dram, year by year. If you want to explore their range further, the full Killowen collection gives a good sense of how wide their ambition runs. And for those who found their appetite for pairing events whetted, The Focacceria's Wine Finished Whiskies session covered complementary ground from a different angle entirely.

Event 79 was, in the end, a reminder of why Belfast Whiskey Week exists: not simply to pour good whiskey, but to create the conditions in which people can genuinely connect with it. Sláinte to Killowen, to the team at Neighbourhood Cafe, and to everyone who gave up their Wednesday evening to sit quietly with something worth paying attention to.