Midleton Very Rare Showcase – Belfast Whiskey Week 2021

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

Filed: 28 Jul 2021
By: Belfast Whiskey Week
Read: 3 min
Ref: BWW/21/092

There are events at Belfast Whiskey Week that feel like an occasion before a drop has even been poured, and Session 29 — the Midleton Very Rare Showcase on the evening of 28th July 2021 — was exactly that kind of gathering. Six carefully selected 50ml samples, one of Ireland's most storied distillery names, and a global audience lifting their glasses in something close to reverence. This was the uisce beatha at its most considered, most deliberate, most alive.

About This Event

This tasting includes 6 x 50ml Samples and will take place on the 28th @ 18:00.

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

Midleton Very Rare occupies a particular place in the Irish whiskey canon. Every year since 1984, a new vintage has arrived as a hand-selected statement of what the Midleton distillery — that vast, quietly extraordinary complex in County Cork — is capable of at its very best. It is, as the brand itself puts it, the marker on the whiskey Ireland calendar. To give it a dedicated showcase at Belfast Whiskey Week 2021 was not pageantry; it was simply the right thing to do.

The format — six 50ml samples delivered to attendees wherever they happened to be, from Belfast to Brisbane, from Donegal to Denmark — reflected the particular character of BWW2021 as a whole. The festival had found its footing in the hybrid and the distributed, making the sheugh between Northern Ireland and the rest of the world feel rather narrower than usual. The Midleton showcase leaned into that fully. Whether you collected your pack from a localised depot or had it arrive on your doorstep, the contents were the same: a considered flight through some of the most nuanced whiskey Ireland produces, guided by people who clearly love what they do.

What distinguished the evening was its unhurried quality. A showcase format, unlike a masterclass, trusts the whiskey to do a good deal of the talking — and Midleton Very Rare repays that trust handsomely. Attendees moved through their samples with the kind of attention the liquid deserves: noting the layered orchard fruit, the vanilla warmth, the gentle oak that never overpowers, the long, clean finish that is a hallmark of the style. For those encountering the range for the first time, it was a revelation. For the seasoned devotees, it was confirmation of something already known but always worth revisiting.

Midleton's presence at Belfast Whiskey Week has consistently been one of the festival's premium anchors — appearing not only through dedicated showcase sessions like this one, but through single cask masterclasses and alongside the celebrated Method & Madness and Spot Whiskeys expressions. That breadth of representation speaks to a distillery with genuine range, one that can stand proudly in the company of its Ulster neighbours. And speaking of neighbours — 2021 also brought some exceptional sessions from the north coast, including the Bushmills Causeway Collection Masterclass, a reminder that the island's whiskey tradition runs deep from Cork to Antrim, from the very south to the far north.

Session 29 was, in the truest sense of the duchas, a celebration of inheritance — of craft passed carefully through decades, of a distillery that takes its annual vintage seriously enough to put its name on it year after year. Sláinte mhaith to everyone who raised a glass on that July evening. The whiskey was worthy of the occasion, and the occasion was worthy of the whiskey.