Robin Martin & the Outlaws | BWW 2025 Tasting Belfast

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/25/092

Some events at Belfast Whiskey Week announce themselves quietly and then refuse to be forgotten. Robin Elliot presents: Robin Martin and the Outlaws — held on the evening of 23rd July 2025 at the Deer's Head Music Hall — was precisely that kind of night. Part specialist tasting, part storytelling session, part late-evening ritual, it gathered a room full of curious drinkers and sent them home with something harder to name than a tasting note.

Looking Back

The Deer's Head Music Hall is not a neutral space. One of Belfast's most storied venues, it carries the seanchas of the city in its walls — the grain of old wood, the echo of a thousand nights before this one. Choosing it as the setting for a specialist whiskey tasting was a statement in itself. Whiskey, after all, has always been at home where stories are told, and Robin Elliot understood that when he designed this evening around the figure of Robin Martin and the loose, irreverent collective known as the Outlaws.

What unfolded was a tasting with genuine character — not the kind of polished, clipboard-and-spittoon formality that can sometimes drain the life from a dram, but something with duchas running through it. Robin Elliot led proceedings with the easy authority of someone who knows that whiskey opens people up, and that the best education happens when the room is relaxed enough to ask honest questions. The drams moved through the glasses with purpose, each one positioned within a narrative that gave attendees context without lecturing them.

McConnell's, the Belfast-born Irish whiskey that has been quietly and confidently reclaiming its place in the city's identity, was woven through the evening in a way that felt organic rather than promotional. McConnell's carries real weight as a brand — it is a name that belonged to Belfast long before the current revival, and evenings like this one help reconnect that history to a living, drinking public. If you want to understand how the city's whiskey culture is being rebuilt, the Belfast Whiskey Map offers a useful starting point for that wider story.

The 9pm start gave the event a distinctly after-dark energy, separating it from the afternoon masterclasses and early-evening sessions that populated the rest of the festival calendar. By the time glasses were raised, the Deer's Head had settled into that particular warmth that only comes when a room is properly inhabited. Sláinte was said with feeling. The Outlaws, whoever they turned out to be on the night, earned their name — this was not a tasting that played by the rules, and it was better for it. Those who missed it might consider some of the festival's other late-night and atmosphere-led experiences, including the 19th Hole Late Night BBQ & Exclusive Drams or the Pop & Toast Art Exhibition and Fine Whiskey Tasting, both of which shared something of the same spirit.

Belfast Whiskey Week 2025 produced no shortage of memorable moments, but this one had a particular quality — the sense that the people in that room were part of something assembled rather than manufactured. Robin Elliot brought curiosity, knowledge, and a light touch, and the Deer's Head provided the tír for it all to breathe in. The uisce beatha did the rest.