Scotch Malt Whisky Society Showcase – Belfast Whiskey Week 2021

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

Filed: 30 Jul 2021
By: Belfast Whiskey Week
Read: 3 min
Format: Online Tasting
Ref: BWW/21/204

When the Scotch Malt Whisky Society brought its singular approach to uisce beatha to Belfast Whiskey Week 2021, it wasn't just a tasting — it was a masterclass in the unexpected. Session 81, held on the evening of 30th July, gave participants six carefully selected 50ml samples and an invitation to think differently about what a dram could be. In a festival year shaped by innovation and adaptation, this showcase sat comfortably among the most distinctive offerings on the programme.

About This Event

This tasting includes 6 x 50ml Samples and will take place on the 30th @ 19:00.

For those in the USA, Australia, Sweden, Europe, the Republic of Ireland or Northern Ireland, you will be able to save on delivery costs by having your package to sent to a localised depot for collection. You will be charged a small fee upon collection, but the cost will be much cheaper than having packs delivered to individual addresses. If you would like to avail of this option, please make a note in the Special Instructions box, and we will contact you at a later date to arrange this and refund your delivery charges.

Looking Back

The Scotch Malt Whisky Society occupies a rare place in the world of whisky. Founded in Edinburgh in 1983, the SMWS is built on a single, powerful idea: bottle single casks at cask strength, unfiltered and largely unadorned, and let the whisky speak entirely for itself. No blending to a house style, no chasing a consistent flavour profile — just the raw, honest character of a single barrel, given a numerical code rather than a distillery name, and a wonderfully evocative tasting note to guide the curious drinker. It is a philosophy that rewards attention and punishes indifference, and it found a very willing audience during BWW 2021.

Six samples arrived in each pack — a generous breadth of expression that allowed the evening to unfold almost like a seanchas, a shared story told in chapters. Participants across Northern Ireland, the Republic, Europe, Australia, Sweden and the United States sat down at more or less the same hour on a July Friday, opening the same bottles, comparing notes across time zones and sheughs of every kind. That international reach was one of the defining qualities of the 2021 festival, and the SMWS Showcase leaned into it with confidence. The Society's own global membership meant many attendees already spoke the language of cask codes and abstract tasting descriptors — but newcomers found themselves warmly welcomed into the conversation.

The format — a Showcase rather than a guided MasterClass — gave the evening a pleasingly open texture. There was structure, certainly, but also space for the kind of digression and debate that the best whisky nights produce naturally. The SMWS drams have a habit of doing that: a whisky bottled from a single cask, at full strength, with no apology, tends to provoke an honest reaction rather than a polished one. Some samples leaned maritime and austere; others were richly sweet or distinctly spiced. That range, across six glasses, made for a genuine journey rather than a simple procession.

For those who wanted to anchor the evening in a broader sense of what Belfast Whiskey Week 2021 had to offer, the full programme was rich with comparable depth. The Bushmills History MasterClass (Session 83) offered a quite different kind of duchas — the deep roots of Irish distilling tradition rather than the SMWS's adventurous single-cask philosophy — while sessions like the Bushmills Causeway Collection MasterClass (Session 50) showed how Irish whiskey was pushing its own boundaries with equal ambition. There was, across the week, a real sense of the wider world of whisky in productive conversation with the tír and tradition of this island.

The SMWS Showcase was, in the end, exactly what a festival session should be: it sent you somewhere you hadn't quite expected to go, and left you wanting to go further. Sláinte to the Society, and to every participant who raised a glass that Friday evening — wherever in the world they happened to be sitting.