Marty McAuley Walking Tour – Belfast Whiskey Week 2024

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

Filed: 27 Jul 2024
By: Belfast Whiskey Week
Read: 3 min
Ref: BWW/24/732

There are masterclasses, there are tastings, and then there is a dander through Belfast with Marty McAuley. On 27th July 2024, Session 80 of Belfast Whiskey Week took to the streets of the city in the most elemental way possible — on foot, in company, and with a dram or two waiting around every corner. It was, by any measure, one of the most human things the festival has ever put on.

About This Event

There’s no easier way to put this: Put your comfy shoes on, dress for Belfast Weather, grab yer ticket and meet me at City Hall. I’ll be wearing clothes. Easy to find sure, with a Whiskey Week sign. Once all the stragglers get here - we’re off! Then it’s just me, you, and a handful of other chaps and lassies, as we dander about Belfast in search of good craic, good whiskey and good places to tell my stories. This walking tour is full of food, whiskies and me imparting the impartiality, expelling the experiences and holding forth the history of this Great Whiskey City. No need to eat before hand - I’ll feed and water you, promise - Marty McAuley

Looking Back

It started, as Marty promised, at City Hall. He was easy enough to find — the man with the Belfast Whiskey Week sign and, true to his word, clothes on. From that unpromising civic starting point, a loose gathering of strangers with comfy shoes and a healthy curiosity about this city's relationship with uisce beatha fell into step behind him, and something quietly magic began to unfold. Belfast, seen at walking pace through the eyes of someone who genuinely loves it, is a different city entirely from the one you pass through on the bus.

Marty's style is that rare thing: learned without being leaden, and funny without trying too hard. He carries the seanchas of this whiskey city lightly, dropping history and anecdote in equal measure as the group moved through streets that have been shaped, in more ways than one, by the distilling trade. The stories ranged from the grand sweep of Belfast's Victorian whiskey boom to the kind of granular local detail — a name above a door, a long-demolished warehouse, a family connection — that you only get from someone who has been paying attention for years. This is duchas in the truest sense: a living, breathing inheritance passed on in conversation.

The food and whiskey stops along the route were well chosen and generously poured. Marty had been clear in the session description that there was no need to eat beforehand, and he kept that promise. Between the walking and the eating and the occasional sláinte raised in a snug or on a pavement, the two-odd hours passed with the particular speed that only good company produces. For context on some of the distilling heritage woven through his stories, it's worth exploring Session 83: Bushmills History, which covers much of the deep archival background in a more formal setting — the two events complement each other well.

What distinguished this session from the festival's tasting-room events was the way it used the city itself as the vessel. Belfast is not merely a backdrop to its whiskey story; it is part of the flavour. The sheugh-and-cobble geography of the place, the way the linen and shipbuilding trades and the distilling industry once all jostled for the same streets, the names that keep recurring across centuries — all of it landed differently because you were standing in the middle of it. Those who had also attended something like the Bushmills Causeway Collection MasterClass found the on-the-ground context a useful counterpoint to the glass-in-hand scholarship of the tasting room.

At £15, Session 80 was one of the festival's most accessible events and, in its own way, one of its most generous. You left with a fuller stomach, a warmer understanding of the tír you were walking through, and — if you were paying attention — a good few stories worth telling yourself. Belfast Whiskey Week runs events across the full spectrum from introductory brand introductions to deep-dive masterclasses, but Marty's walking tour sits apart from all of them. It is the festival at its most rooted, and its most alive.