OurWhisky Foundation & Dublin Liberties | Belfast Whiskey Week 2024

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

Filed: 19 Jul 2024
By: Belfast Whiskey Week
Read: 3 min
Ref: BWW/24/556

Some events pour whiskey into your glass. Others pour something harder to define — purpose, perhaps, or a sense that the industry you love is finally looking honestly at itself. The BWW Connections session hosted by the OurWhisky Foundation, held at Belfast's beloved Duke of York on 19th July 2024, was very much the latter. Paired with Dublin Liberties, one of the Liberties quarter's most characterful distilleries, it made for an evening that was as nourishing as it was thought-provoking.

About This Event

With an emphasis on accessibility and desire to bring whiskey to new drinkers as well as old, we are humbled to be joined this year by OurWhisky Foundation. OurWhisky was founded in 2018 as a movement to champion inclusion and diversity among both whisky makers and drinkers. Now, four years later, it’s time to evolve. The OurWhisky Foundation is a new non-profit organisation, established in March 2022, to recognise, support and empower women working in whisky around the world, while advocating for a more inclusive and diverse industry. Through collaboration with the global whisky community, the OurWhisky Foundation aims to challenge whisky’s outdated gendered image and help women to thrive in their careers.

Looking Back

The Duke of York, tucked down Commercial Court in the heart of the Cathedral Quarter, has long been a gathering place for Belfast people — a space where conversation flows as freely as the drink. It felt like the right tír for this particular session. The OurWhisky Foundation, established as a non-profit in March 2022, arrived not as a guest but as a presence: confident, warm, and entirely clear-eyed about why it exists. Founded originally in 2018 as a grassroots movement, OurWhisky has evolved into a formal structure dedicated to recognising, supporting, and empowering women working in whisky around the world. In the seanchas of an industry that has too often told a single story about who belongs at the table, this felt like a genuine corrective.

The session drew a genuinely mixed room — seasoned drinkers and curious newcomers alike, which is precisely the point. There was no gatekeeping here, no arcane vocabulary deployed to separate the initiated from the rest. The format leaned into accessibility, with conversation as central as the liquid in the glass. The OurWhisky Foundation's ethos — that whiskey's gendered image is a construct, not a destiny — animated every pour and every exchange. It is the kind of duchas the industry needs to build: a sense of belonging that doesn't depend on who you already are when you walk through the door.

Dublin Liberties brought the whiskey, and it did so with distinction. Named for one of Dublin's oldest and most storied neighbourhoods, Dublin Liberties distillery carries the weight and warmth of a place that has always been a little outside the pale — independent, inventive, quietly proud. Their expressions provided an ideal vehicle for the evening's conversations: approachable enough to welcome the uninitiated, layered enough to reward those who lingered. Together, the brand and the Foundation made for a pairing that felt genuinely considered rather than merely convenient.

For those who want to trace Belfast Whiskey Week's relationship with the great Irish distilleries, it's worth noting the festival's long and affectionate history with the north coast giants. Sessions like the Bushmills History MasterClass and the deep-dive Bushmills Causeway Collection MasterClass have shown how the festival holds space for heritage and narrative alongside newer voices. The OurWhisky Foundation session felt like a natural companion to that tradition — equally serious about whiskey, but asking different and equally important questions. You can explore the full range of past and present events on our Whiskey Map.

Sláinte, then, to the OurWhisky Foundation and to Dublin Liberties for an evening that left the room a little different from how it found it. The uisce beatha was excellent. The conversation was better. That, in the end, is what BWW Connections is for.