The Vault · Archive
OurWhiskey Foundation at Belfast Whiskey Week 2025 | Welcome to Belfast
On a bright July afternoon in 2025, the Library Bar became something more than a venue — it became a room full of honest conversation. The OurWhiskey Foundation brought its Welcome to Belfast session to Belfast Whiskey Week 2025, and with a ticket price of nothing and a welcome extended to everyone, it set a tone that few events at the festival could match.
Looking Back
There are events at a whiskey festival that you attend for the drams, and there are events you attend because they matter. Welcome to Belfast landed firmly in the second category. Hosted by the OurWhiskey Foundation — an organisation whose work centres on making the whiskey world more inclusive, more representative, and more honest about who it welcomes — this free afternoon session at the Library Bar drew a crowd that reflected exactly the kind of diversity the Foundation exists to champion. Curious newcomers sat alongside seasoned enthusiasts, and that was entirely the point.
The OurWhiskey Foundation exists to dismantle the invisible velvet rope that has long surrounded whiskey culture. Their work spans education, mentorship, and advocacy, and in Belfast they found a city with its own complex relationship with belonging — a duchas, a sense of place, that is still being written. The conversation in that room acknowledged as much. This wasn't a polished brand presentation; it was something closer to seanchas — the living tradition of storytelling and shared knowledge — applied to a drinks category that doesn't always make space for it.
Attendees came away with more than an introduction to uisce beatha. They left with a clearer understanding of why representation in whiskey matters, who is doing the work to change things, and how a community can form around a shared love of the water of life without pulling up the ladder behind it. The Library Bar, warm and intimate as ever, proved the ideal tír — the right territory — for that kind of open exchange. No gatekeeping. No hierarchy. Just good faith and good spirit.
It was no coincidence that this event sat in the same week as To Mix or Compete?: A Guide to Cocktail Competitions, another session that challenged who gets to participate and how. Together they formed an informal thread through BWW2025 — a quiet but insistent argument that the future of Irish whiskey belongs to more people than the past ever allowed. If you're planning your approach to future festivals, our Whiskey Map is a good place to start finding your own way in.
Free tickets, a generous room, and a foundation doing genuinely important work: Welcome to Belfast was one of those sessions that earns its place on the programme not through spectacle but through substance. Sláinte to the OurWhiskey Foundation for bringing that conversation to our city — and to every attendee who showed up, listened, and added their voice to it.
More from Belfast Whiskey Week
Explore the full programme on the Belfast Whiskey Week Whiskey Map.
Event Gallery
