Liquids & Literary Art | Experience Event | 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/25/412

Some evenings at Belfast Whiskey Week linger long after the last glass is set down — and Liquids & Literary Art, held on the evening of 22nd July 2025 at The Harrison, was precisely that kind of night. Part tasting, part performance, this commissioned experience brought together the crafted word and the crafted cocktail in a way that felt genuinely, unhurriedly alive. Liquid Minds designed three bespoke cocktails to accompany the poetry and prose of reader Richard Clements, and from the first sip to the final line, the room was transported somewhere altogether elsewhere.

About This Event

Liquid minds have designed three bespoke cocktails that transport you to imaginary places and periods in time that are reflective of the literary poem and prose read by Richard Clements

Looking Back

There is an old idea, deep in the duchas of these islands, that a story needs a hearth to gather around. On a July Tuesday in Belfast, that hearth was The Harrison — a venue that wears its character without apology — and the warmth it offered was the kind that comes from a room full of people willing to be moved. Doors opened at 9pm, late enough to feel like a proper occasion, and those who arrived found themselves stepping into something that resisted easy categorisation. This was neither a conventional cocktail masterclass nor a straightforward literary reading. It was something richer and stranger than either.

Liquid Minds, the creative bar concept behind the drinks programme, had approached the brief with evident seriousness. Three cocktails were developed not as accompaniments to the words, but as parallel texts — each one designed to conjure a specific imaginary place or period in time that mirrored the piece being read. The result was a form of double storytelling: Richard Clements gave voice to the poem or prose with quiet authority, and simultaneously the glass in your hand offered its own version of the same journey. Flavour as seanchas. Drink as memory-place. It sounds fanciful written down, and yet it worked — genuinely, convincingly worked.

The specifics of each cocktail remained, by intention, somewhat enigmatic. Liquid Minds built their recipes around the particular emotional and temporal landscape of each piece, meaning the drinks shifted in character as the evening moved through its three movements. One arrived cool and slightly austere, redolent of distance and old paper; another was warmer, herbaceous, with a depth that felt rooted in some imagined rural tír; the third had edges to it — a brightness and a sting that matched the energy of whatever world it was summoning. Attendees who had explored the arts-forward programming elsewhere in the festival week — including the wonderful Pop & Toast: Art Exhibition and Fine Whiskey Tasting — would have recognised this same instinct: that whiskey and its cousins are as capable of carrying meaning as any canvas or stanza.

Richard Clements proved a generous and unhurried presence at the front of the room. His reading was not performative in any showy sense; he let the language do the work, which is, of course, exactly right. The texts chosen — poems and prose that gestured toward other times, other geographies, inner and outer landscapes — gave Liquid Minds the raw material they needed, and the interplay between spoken word and tasted flavour became genuinely immersive by the second cocktail. For those who think about whiskey and spirits as cultural objects as much as sensory ones, this was the kind of event that rewards that way of thinking. Sláinte to the idea of it, and to the execution.

At £40 for three bespoke cocktails and a full literary experience in one of Belfast's most characterful rooms, Liquids & Literary Art represented Belfast Whiskey Week at its most adventurous and most itself — rooted in place, open to the world, and unwilling to settle for the straightforward when the extraordinary is within reach. If you enjoyed the creative ambition on show here, it's worth exploring the full scope of what the 2025 festival offered: WHISK(E)Y WARS brought its own theatrical energy to the week, while Whiskey Through the Decades: Part 1 offered a more structured journey through time — different in form, but kindred in spirit.