Method & Madness x Stephen Whalley | Belfast Whiskey Week 2024

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

Filed: 23 Jul 2024
By: Belfast Whiskey Week
Read: 3 min
Ref: BWW/24/780

Some sessions at Belfast Whiskey Week linger in the memory for the drams alone. Session 47 in 2024 had something more — it asked you to make something beautiful before you drank something beautiful. The Method & Madness Marbling Workshop, delivered in partnership with Belfast artist Stephen Whalley, brought together centuries-old craft and Midleton's most experimental whiskey range in a session that was as much art class as tasting room.

About This Event

Join us for a Method And Madness Marbling Workshop with local artist Stephen Whalley. Learn how to ‘paint on water’ using centuries-old marbling techniques and taste the experimental whiskey range; Method And Madness from Midleton Distillery. The Method and Madness whiskies have brought about a vibrant new coming of age whiskey story from the micro distillery at Midleton. Each expression pushes the boundaries of cask influence and flavour profiling. Be prepared to be a budding colourful artist for the session while sipping colourful expressions that will test your taste buds.

Looking Back

Held on 23 July 2024 at Whalley Studios, this was one of those BWW events that defied easy categorisation — and was all the better for it. Attendees arrived not to sit and sip in the conventional sense, but to roll up their sleeves and learn the ancient art of marbling: painting on water, coaxing colour across a surface using techniques that stretch back hundreds of years. Stephen Whalley, whose studio practice is rooted in texture, pattern and the unexpected, proved a generous and patient guide. Whether your hands were steady or shaking slightly with anticipation — and a dram or two — the results were striking, personal, and impossible to replicate. That irreproducibility, it turned out, was the whole point.

Running alongside the marbling was a guided tasting of the Method and Madness range from the micro distillery at Midleton, in County Cork. Where Midleton Very Rare represents the pinnacle of the distillery's craft — a hand-selected annual vintage that has marked the Irish whiskey calendar since 1984 — Method and Madness occupies a different creative space entirely. These are whiskies built for experimentation: unusual cask finishes, unconventional grain combinations, flavour profiles that push well beyond the expected. They are, in the best sense, works in progress — each bottle a record of someone in a distillery somewhere in Cork asking, quietly, what if?

The pairing of medium and message here was anything but accidental. Watching colour bloom and drift across a water surface is not so different from watching a whiskey open up in the glass — both reward patience, both resist full control, and both produce something that can never be exactly reproduced. Attendees at this session seemed to feel that resonance acutely. The conversation in the room moved freely between the technique on the tray in front of them and the liquid in their glass, and Whalley and the brand team held that space with warmth and genuine knowledge.

It's worth noting that Midleton has had a strong and thoughtful presence at Belfast Whiskey Week across multiple years, with sessions spanning everything from intimate masterclasses to larger showcase tastings. If you've explored the festival's deeper Irish whiskey programming — or followed the Whiskey Map to trace the full geography of what's been poured at BWW — you'll know that the Midleton stable, from the Spot Whiskeys to Method and Madness, consistently delivers some of the most considered sessions on the calendar. This one, though, had a texture all of its own.

At £45, Session 47 asked attendees to invest an afternoon in the idea that craft — whether in a distillery or a studio — is fundamentally an act of curiosity. Those who came left with a piece of marbled paper, a palate stretched by some genuinely unusual whiskey, and, if the atmosphere in Whalley Studios was any guide, a very good story to tell. Sláinte mhaith to everyone who made it happen.