McConnell's Distillery Tour – Belfast Whiskey Week 2024

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

Filed: 26 Jul 2024
By: Belfast Whiskey Week
Read: 3 min
Ref: BWW/24/516

When the doors of McConnell's Irish Whisky Distillery swung open for Belfast Whiskey Week 2024, attendees of event MT26A weren't just stepping into a new attraction — they were stepping into a piece of Belfast's reclaimed duchas, its heritage given fresh breath and new purpose. This Signature Distillery Tour, held on 26th July 2024, offered something genuinely rare: the chance to be among the very first visitors in the world to experience a working distillery that had only recently opened its doors, right in the heart of this city.

About This Event

Book in for a Signature Tour with McConnell's and spend some time in one of Belfast's most historic buildings. Having only opened its doors a few months ago, you will be one of the first in the World to experience this truly spectacular Distillery and Visitor Attraction. It is only a few minutes walk from the City Centre and will last an hour.

Looking Back

There's a particular electricity to being early. Not first-through-the-door early in a queue, but historically early — present at a moment that will, in years to come, become part of a place's seanchas, its story. That's exactly what those who booked onto MT26A experienced on a July morning in Belfast city. McConnell's Distillery had only been open a matter of months, and the guided tour felt less like a polished tourist itinerary and more like a privileged glimpse behind the curtain of something still finding its magnificent feet.

The building itself deserves a moment's pause before the whiskey is even mentioned. Housed in one of Belfast's most storied structures, the distillery wears the city's industrial and cultural history on its stone walls. McConnell's as a brand carries extraordinary weight — the name dates back to 1776, making it one of the oldest Irish whiskey brands in existence, and the reopening of production in Belfast represents not just a commercial venture but a genuine homecoming for uisce beatha in the north. Standing in a space where craft and history converge, visitors could feel the significance of the moment, even if the stills were still relatively new and gleaming.

The Signature Tour lasted around an hour — a well-paced journey through the distillery's spaces, taking in the production process, the architectural grandeur of the building, and the story of McConnell's own remarkable revival. Guides were clearly passionate and well-versed, delivering the kind of informed warmth that turns a guided walk into a genuine conversation. Questions were welcomed; there was none of that sense of being shuffled through a script. At £25 a head, it represented serious value for what was, in every sense, a world-first kind of experience — and one that sat only a few minutes' walk from Belfast city centre, rooting this whiskey journey firmly in the tír of the city itself.

For those who missed this particular date, McConnell's tours ran across multiple slots during BWW2024 — you can explore the MT19B McConnell's Signature Distillery Tour and MT20A McConnell's Signature Distillery Tour listings to get a sense of the full programme. And if you're the kind of visitor who likes to make a festival week of it, it's worth noting that Titanic Distillers were also running their own Signature Tours across the same period — another chapter in Belfast's fast-growing story as a world-class whiskey destination.

Looking back on MT26A, what lingers isn't just the whiskey — though McConnell's is well worth raising a glass to, sláinte — it's the particular pleasure of witnessing something new that is also very old. Belfast's whiskey culture is deep-rooted, and events like this one remind us that the sheugh between past and present is narrower than it sometimes seems. Here's hoping many more visitors find their way through those doors in the years ahead.