McConnell's Distillery 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/24/500

There are few privileges quite like being among the first in the world to walk the floor of a working distillery, and that is precisely what Belfast Whiskey Week 2024 offered with the McConnell's Signature Distillery Tour on the 27th of July. Held within one of Belfast's most storied historic buildings, just a short stroll from the city centre, this was an hour-long immersion in the duchas — the heritage — of Irish whiskey making, led by one of the brands most firmly rooted in Belfast's own seanchas. At £25 a head, it was one of the festival's most intimate and genuinely historic experiences.

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

McConnell's had only opened the doors of its distillery a matter of months before Belfast Whiskey Week 2024 arrived, which meant that everyone who laced up their shoes and made their way through those grand doors during the festival was, in the most literal sense, a pioneer. The building itself commands attention before you've even crossed the threshold — a structure soaked in Belfast character, the kind of place that holds its history in its brickwork. To walk it as a working distillery, with the warm, sweet breath of the still house in the air, was something else entirely.

The Signature Tour took attendees through the full story of McConnell's — a brand that traces its roots back to 1776 and carries that lineage with quiet confidence rather than bluster. Guides spoke with real knowledge and evident pride about the grain-to-glass process unfolding around them, making the science of distillation feel accessible without ever dumbing it down. This was uisce beatha — the water of life — being made right here, on Belfast soil, for the first time in generations, and the room felt that weight.

What set this particular session apart was the sense of occasion. McConnell's is not simply reviving a name; it is genuinely reconstructing a tradition in a city that had been without a working distillery of its own for far too long. Attendees who had also booked onto the Titanic Distillers Signature Tour were, in a single festival week, able to witness two distinct chapters of Belfast's whiskey renaissance — a remarkable thing, and a testament to what BWW2024 set out to do across the tir.

The tasting element that concluded the tour gave the whole experience its proper full stop — a dram in hand, in a distillery that had barely drawn breath, surrounded by the copper and oak of something just beginning. Whether you came as a seasoned whiskey lover or a curious first-timer, there was nothing exclusionary about McConnell's hospitality. The welcome was Belfast to its core: warm, straight-talking, and generous. If you missed this session, there were other McConnell's Signature Tour dates available across the festival, each one just as carefully run.

For those planning their next festival adventure or looking to map out Belfast's growing whiskey landscape, the Belfast Whiskey Week Whiskey Map is the best place to start — and McConnell's sits proudly on it. Sláinte mhaith to everyone who raised a glass on that July afternoon. You were there at the beginning of something.