Marty McAuley's Belfast Whiskey Walking Tour | BWW 2024

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

Filed: 19 Jul 2024
By: Belfast Whiskey Week
Read: 3 min
Ref: BWW/24/252

Some events at Belfast Whiskey Week are defined by the liquid in the glass. Marty McAuley's Whiskey, Wonderings & Walking Tour was defined by something older and harder to bottle: the city itself. On a July afternoon in 2024, a small, fortunate group laced up their shoes, met Marty outside City Hall, and gave themselves over to Belfast — its streets, its stories, and its uisce beatha.

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

There's a word in Irish, dúchas, that carries the weight of belonging to a place — an inherited sense of home, culture, and the land underfoot. Marty McAuley wears his dúchas lightly but unmistakably. Armed with little more than a Belfast Whiskey Week sign, a fund of stories, and a working knowledge of where to find a good dram, he gathered his charges at City Hall and set off into the city with the easy confidence of a man who has walked these streets a thousand times and still finds something new to say about them.

What followed was, by all accounts, one of the most distinctive sessions in the 2024 festival programme. This wasn't a masterclass in a quiet room — it was seanchas on the move, history told in the places where it happened. Marty wove the story of Belfast as a whiskey city through the laneways and thoroughfares of the city centre, feeding and watering his walkers as he went. True to his word, guests needed no dinner beforehand. Food appeared. Whiskey appeared. And Marty's stories appeared right alongside them, expelling experiences and holding forth history in equal measure.

The tour sat naturally within a wider conversation about Belfast's whiskey heritage that ran through BWW 2024. For those who wanted to dig deeper into the liquid itself after seeing the city, sessions like the Bushmills History MasterClass and the Bushmills Causeway Collection MasterClass offered the perfect complement — the archive opened up, the distillery story laid out in full. But Marty's tour did something those indoor sessions couldn't: it put the whiskey back into its tír, back into the place that made it mean something.

What made this event genuinely special was its democratic warmth. At £15, it was among the most accessible sessions in the programme, and Marty's instinct — stated plainly in his own words — was to welcome everyone, stragglers included. There was no hierarchy here, no initiation rite for the whiskey-literate. A curious first-timer and a seasoned enthusiast would have walked away equally delighted, equally fed, and equally charmed. That's a rare thing to pull off, and it speaks to the calibre of the guide. If you're curious about the full scope of what Belfast Whiskey Week explores across the city's liquid landscape, the Belfast Whiskey Map is a fine place to start your own wanderings.

Marty McAuley's walking tour was, in many ways, the purest expression of what Belfast Whiskey Week is for: not just tasting whiskey, but understanding why Belfast and whiskey belong together. Sláinte, Marty — and thank you for the dander.