Mezcal Showcase at Belfast Whiskey Week 2021 | Session 85

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

Filed: 27 Jul 2021
By: Belfast Whiskey Week
Read: 3 min
Format: Online Tasting
Ref: BWW/21/004

Belfast Whiskey Week has always understood that the story of uisce beatha — the water of life — is a story shared across cultures and continents, not a tale belonging to any one soil alone. Session 85 of BWW2021, held on 27th July 2021, leaned into that spirit with characteristic boldness, offering participants a deep, generous dive into the world of mezcal: six 50ml samples, delivered to your door, and a guided showcase that brought the smoky highlands of Oaxaca right into your glass.

About This Event

This tasting includes 6 x 50ml Samples and will take place on the 27th @ 16:00.

For those in the USA, Australia, Sweden, Europe, the Republic of Ireland or Northern Ireland, you will be able to save on delivery costs by having your package to sent to a localised depot for collection. You will be charged a small fee upon collection, but the cost will be much cheaper than having packs delivered to individual addresses. If you would like to avail of this option, please make a note in the Special Instructions box, and we will contact you at a later date to arrange this and refund your delivery charges.

Looking Back

There is a word in Irish — dúchas — that speaks to a sense of belonging, of something native and rooted in the land. Mezcal carries its own version of that: every bottle tells you exactly where it came from, which agave species gave its heart to the still, which palenquero tended the roasting pit. For an audience largely steeped in the traditions of Irish and Scotch whiskey, this showcase offered a fascinating mirror — a spirit defined, like the best of what we know from these shores, by place, patience, and fire.

The format for Session 85 followed the well-loved BWW Showcase model: six curated 50ml samples sent directly to participants, with a guided tasting led from a single location and broadcast to attendees spread across Northern Ireland, the Republic, Europe, the USA, Australia, and Sweden. The festival's localised depot collection option — introduced for BWW2021 to ease the logistics of international shipping — meant that the sheugh between continents felt a little narrower that evening. Sipping alongside strangers in Scandinavia and the southern hemisphere, united by the same smoke and agave sweetness, is the sort of thing that doesn't happen without careful organisation and genuine ambition.

Six samples across a single session is a generous hand. Mezcal rewards that kind of breadth — the range between a young espadin and an aged tobalá, between Guerrero and Oaxaca, can be as dramatic as any whiskey flight. Participants were encouraged to approach each pour slowly, to nose the mineral earthiness, the char, the fruit, the occasional floral note that surprises first-timers and delights the experienced alike. For those whose palates had been shaped by BWW2021's many Irish whiskey sessions — perhaps the Bushmills Cask Strength Mini-MasterClass or the deep historical exploration of Session 83's Bushmills History MasterClass — the mezcal showcase offered a welcome and illuminating contrast: different terroir, different tradition, the same fundamental alchemy of grain, fire, and time.

It would be easy to see a mezcal session at an Irish whiskey festival as a curio, a palate-cleanser between the real business of the week. That reading would be wrong. BWW2021 was built on the understanding that seanchas — the lore and the telling of stories — matters as much as what's in the glass. Mezcal has its own rich seanchas, reaching back centuries before colonial distillation ever touched the Americas. Bringing that story to a Belfast Whiskey Week audience was a quiet act of respect for the wider world of spirits, and participants left the session — or at least, finished their sixth sample — with a genuine appreciation of a craft tradition as rigorous and as proud as anything produced on this island.

If Session 85 proved anything, it is that curiosity is the best companion to a dram. Whether you came to BWW2021 for the Bushmills deep-dives, the Sexton Deconstruction, or simply to explore, this mezcal showcase rewarded the open-minded. Sláinte to everyone who raised a glass that Tuesday afternoon — wherever in the world they happened to be sitting.