Roe & Co x Stock Kitchen Food Pairing | Belfast Whiskey Week 2024

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

Filed: 20 Jul 2024
By: Belfast Whiskey Week
Read: 3 min
Ref: BWW/24/788

There are tastings, and then there are experiences — and Session 86 of Belfast Whiskey Week 2024 fell firmly into the latter category. On 20th July, Roe & Co Brand Ambassador Wayne Devlin joined celebrated chef Danny Millar at Stock Kitchen for an evening that set out to do nothing less than reimagine the way we understand flavour. This was fine dining and uisce beatha in genuine conversation, each one drawing something new from the other.

About This Event

Reimagining the pillars of taste, where whiskey and food come together.

Join Roe & Co's Brand Ambassador Wayne Devlin and Danny Millar of Stock Kitchen, for a unique Whiskey and food pairing. Guests can expect a menu featuring Roe & Co's innovative expressions paired with tantalizing culinary delights to challenge you to reimagine your palette and sensory expectations.

Looking Back

Stock Kitchen is a venue that knows its own mind — a confident, ingredient-led kitchen that doesn't dress things up for the sake of it. It was a fitting stage for Roe & Co, a Dublin-born blended Irish whiskey that carries a similar philosophy: craft with purpose, flavour without pretension. When Wayne Devlin took guests through the distillery's expressions, it wasn't a lecture in a tasting room — it was a guided conversation running in parallel with every plate that arrived from Danny Millar's kitchen.

The pairing format pushed guests beyond their comfort zones in the best possible way. Where so many whiskey events ask you to nose and sip in quiet contemplation, this one asked you to eat, to taste, to reconsider. A particular brightness in one of Roe & Co's expressions — that characteristic light vanilla and orchard-fruit character the brand is known for — was transformed when met with the right accompaniment on the plate. Flavours that might have sat quietly in the glass suddenly stepped forward. That interplay between whiskey and food is rarely explored with this kind of rigour, and the evening was richer for it.

Wayne Devlin proved a natural guide through the sensory terrain. There's a generosity to how Roe & Co approaches its ambassadorship — it doesn't talk down to a room, and Devlin embodied that. He was as curious about the food as the guests were about the whiskey, which gave the session a genuine duchas — a sense of belonging, of something being shared rather than presented. Danny Millar, for his part, brought the same warmth and precision that has made Stock Kitchen one of Belfast's most respected tables.

If you found yourself at a Bushmills-led session earlier in the week — perhaps exploring the Causeway Collection MasterClass or the deep dive into Bushmills history — Session 86 offered a satisfying counterpoint. Where those events were rooted in heritage and provenance, this one was oriented squarely toward the present tense: what whiskey can do when it sits beside ambitious, thoughtful cooking. It was a reminder that the wider Irish whiskey landscape, from the north coast to Dublin's Liberties, continues to find new ways to tell its story.

At £30 a head, Session 86 represented real value for what was, in effect, a fine dining experience shaped entirely around whiskey. For those who attended, it likely recalibrated something — not just about Roe & Co, but about what a whiskey festival session can aspire to be. Sláinte to Wayne, Danny, and everyone who helped make it happen. We'll be thinking about those pairings for a while yet.