Redbreast MasterClass BWW 2021 | Belfast Whiskey Week

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/21/772

There are sessions you attend, and then there are sessions you remember. Friend at Hand — Session 58 of Belfast Whiskey Week 2021 — fell squarely into the second category. Anchored by Redbreast Irish Whiskey, the benchmark of single pot still craftsmanship, this late-evening MasterClass on 27th July 2021 gathered whiskey lovers around six extraordinary drams and sent them home, or rather kept them at their tables, with a great deal to think about.

About This Event

This tasting includes 6 x 50ml Samples & Glass and will take place on the 27th @ 22:00.

This tasting comprises of:

Midleton Single Cask 2002 17 year old
Midleton Single Cask 1999 20 year old
Redbreast 25 year old Single Cask
Powers 14 year old Single Cask
13 year old Poisoned Chalice
13 year old Girona Gold

Tasting packs will be posted out to you, but may not arrive in time for the tastings. If you wish to collect the pack in Belfast to ensure you have it in time, please contact grace@belfastwhiskeyweek.com after you order.

Looking Back

The lineup alone was enough to make seasoned collectors pause. Six samples arrived in the tasting pack — a run of liquid that read less like a flight and more like a privileged tour through the inner sanctum of Irish distilling. Two Midleton Single Casks bookended the vintage spectrum: a 2002 bottled at 17 years old and a 1999 drawn at 20. These were drams with duchas — a deep sense of belonging, of place and time — the kind of whiskeys that ask you to slow down and pay attention.

Alongside those rare Midletons sat the Redbreast 25 Year Old Single Cask, a whiskey that almost defies easy description. Redbreast is the dram that turned a generation of Scotch drinkers into Irish whiskey people, and at 25 years in wood, it demonstrates exactly why. Rich, layered, and unhurried, it carried the weight of years without ever feeling heavy — all orchard fruit and toasted spice, with that unmistakable pot still creaminess underneath. If the uisce beatha ever needed a portrait painted, this would be the sitting.

The Powers 14 Year Old Single Cask brought a different energy — Powers has always had a more gregarious, bustling character compared to Redbreast's quiet authority, and at 14 years the depth had begun to show itself without quite yet becoming contemplative. Then came a pair of enigmatic 13 Year Olds: the Single Cask and the provocatively named Poisoned Chalice Girona Gold, which carried its mythology on its shoulder with some style. Whether the name was a provocation or a promise rather depended on who was pouring. Those who leaned in found something worth the risk.

The event took place online — part of BWW 2021's hybrid format — and the tasting packs were posted out in advance, with the option to collect in Belfast for those who preferred certainty over anticipation. At £190 for six premium samples and a guided session of this calibre, it represented serious value for the kind of evening that, in any other year, would have required a flight and a hotel booking. The seanchas — the oral tradition, the stories passed between people — still found its way through a screen when the drams in the glass were this good.

If the Friend at Hand MasterClass whetted your appetite for the depth of BWW programming, it was far from an isolated peak. The festival's 2021 schedule was rich with similarly immersive evenings — from the Bushmills History MasterClass that traced centuries of Ulster distilling, to the Bushmills Causeway Collection MasterClass, which explored some of the most distinctive single cask expressions to emerge from the Old Bushmills Distillery in years. Together they formed something greater than a programme — they formed a festival. Sláinte mhaith to everyone who raised a glass that night.