Peated Whiskies Tasting: Scottish & Irish | Belfast Whiskey Week 2025

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

Filed: 15 Jul 2025
By: Belfast Whiskey Week
Read: 3 min
Ref: BWW/25/268

Some tastings court the uncommitted. This one did not. Held at the John Hewitt on the afternoon of 22nd July 2025, An Acquired Taste: Session 2 — Scottish & Irish Peated Whiskies planted its flag firmly in peat-bog territory and dared you to follow. At £15 for a focused flight of smoke-forward uisce beatha from both sides of the North Channel, it was one of the sharpest value propositions of Belfast Whiskey Week 2025 — and arguably one of its most quietly defiant.

About This Event

An Acquired Taste sessions are about getting to try some whiskies with out the fuss. No fuss here. Just Whiskies that you should be able to drink. I mean - there is complete irony in the title! Just trust us - we know whiskey.

A very short tasting of Scottish & Irish Peated Whiskies that are exceptional

If you don’t like these - then we are F*****

Looking Back

The title carried a wink and a warning in equal measure. An Acquired Taste — the irony was fully intended, and the team behind the session made no secret of it. These weren't whiskies engineered to win over the hesitant or mollify the cautious. They were peated expressions chosen because they are, in the honest opinion of the people pouring them, exceptional. The implicit contract with the attendee was refreshingly blunt: trust us, or leave your tenner on the bar.

The John Hewitt provided exactly the right kind of backdrop for this sort of session. One of Belfast's most storied independent bars, it sits in the Cathedral Quarter with the easy confidence of a place that knows its own mind — good beer, good community, no performance required. On a Tuesday afternoon in July, with the city doing that particular thing it does in the summer where it forgets to be grey, the upstairs room gathered a crowd of the genuinely curious: some seasoned peat converts, a few tentative newcomers, and at least a handful of people who had clearly been talked into it by a friend and were suspicious but game. By the end, the room was unified.

The whiskies themselves spanned the sheugh — that narrow, mythologised stretch of water between Ulster and Scotland — and made the case that peat is a language with more than one dialect. Scottish expressions brought the coastal iodine and the heathered, medicinal depth that the tradition is famous for. The Irish entries, fewer in number but no less assured, offered a different register: earthier in some cases, more approachable in the smoke-to-fruit ratio, carrying something of the tír in the glass. Tasted side by side, the contrast was instructive without being academic. This was seanchas in liquid form — old knowledge passed on through the act of drinking together.

What distinguished the session from a standard tutored tasting was the pacing and the tone. There was no fuss, as promised. Commentary was direct and informed rather than performative. Questions were welcomed without condescension. The format — short, focused, honest — trusted the whiskies to do most of the heavy lifting, which they did. For those who had spent the week ranging across the festival's broader programme, from the World Whiskies sessions to the more locally rooted Glens of Antrim: Lir Whiskey Tasting, this felt like a palate-sharpening exercise as much as a pleasure — a reminder of what elemental character in whisky actually tastes like.

The parting shot in the event description — if you don't like these, then we are f***** — landed as both joke and quiet confidence. It got a laugh in the room. But nobody left unconvinced. Sláinte to that.