Mallows Showcase | Belfast Whiskey Week 2021 Review

There's something quietly radical about a whiskey tasting that travels to you rather than the other way around. Session 93 of Belfast Whiskey Week 2021 did exactly that, bringing the Mallows Showcase directly into the homes of attendees on the 27th of July as part of a landmark online festival year. Six 50ml samples, a Tuesday afternoon, and a story worth savouring — that was the promise, and by all accounts it was kept.

Filed: 27 Jul 2021
By: Belfast Whiskey Week
Read: 3 min
Format: Online Tasting
Ref: BWW/21/084

About This Event

This tasting includes 6 x 50ml Samples and will take place on the 27th @ 13:00.

Tasting packs will be posted out to you, but may not arrive in time for the tastings. If you wish to collect the pack in Belfast to ensure you have it in time, please contact grace@belfastwhiskeyweek.com after you order.

Looking Back

Belfast Whiskey Week 2021 was, like so much of that particular era, a festival that had learned to adapt without losing its soul. The hybrid and postal format — born of necessity — turned out to carry its own kind of duchas, that sense of inherited belonging. Receiving a tasting pack through the letterbox, tearing it open at the kitchen table before settling in for a guided session: it was intimate in a way that a crowded tasting room, for all its craic, sometimes isn't. Session 93 leaned into that intimacy fully.

The Mallows Showcase offered six 50ml samples, a format well-suited to exploration rather than ceremony. Showcase sessions at Belfast Whiskey Week have always occupied a particular space in the programme — less instructional than a MasterClass, more expansive than a straightforward introduction, they invite attendees to taste with curiosity rather than reverence. Mallows, as a brand, rewards exactly that kind of open attention. There's a thoughtfulness to their approach to whiskey that makes guided tasting feel like genuine conversation rather than lecture.

The session sat comfortably alongside a broader thread running through BWW2021 — a deep and affectionate focus on the whiskey heritage of this island's north coast and beyond. Attendees who wanted to extend their exploration could look to Session 83: Bushmills History (MasterClass) for a deep-dive into the seanchas of one of Ireland's most storied distilleries, or to Session 50: Bushmills Causeway Collection (MasterClass) for a masterful tour of limited-release expressions shaped by that remarkable tir of Antrim coastline. Together, these sessions formed an unofficial conversation about what Irish whiskey is, where it has come from, and where it might yet go.

For those who collected their packs in Belfast rather than trusting the post — a sensible option the festival rightly flagged — there was something fitting about carrying the uisce beatha home through the city streets before sitting down to taste. BWW has always understood that whiskey is as much about place and occasion as it is about what's in the glass, and that understanding showed even in the small logistical details. The sheugh between a great whiskey experience and a merely good one is often bridged by exactly that kind of thoughtfulness.

Looking back, Session 93 stands as a fine example of what Belfast Whiskey Week does best: creating the conditions for genuine discovery, then stepping back and letting the whiskey do the talking. Sláinte to everyone who raised a glass that Tuesday afternoon — wherever in the world they happened to be sitting. If you'd like to explore more from the 2021 programme, the Whiskey Map is a good place to start finding your bearings across the full festival landscape.