Shortcross Cocktail Making at 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/25/844

On a warm Saturday afternoon in late July, Angel & 2 Bibles opened its doors once again to one of the most hands-on, spirits-forward sessions of Belfast Whiskey Week 2025. Forty-five minutes into the festival's penultimate weekend, guests gathered around the bar to learn the craft of cocktail-making using the full breadth of Shortcross Distillery's range — whiskey, poitín, and gin all in play. It was the kind of afternoon that reminds you why uisce beatha is so much more than a dram in a glass.

About This Event

Everyday during the Festival, we have partnered with one of Belfast’s finest Cocktail lounges: Angel & 2 Bibles. We have built up a great relationship with this quirky and nostalgic venue of the past 4 years, and hosted multiple parties, tastings, fine-dining experiences, as well as the best cocktail experiences in Belfast.

This year we are challenging the staff, the venue, and you to deliver a unique cocktail master class everyday during the festival.

Each session will have three unique drinks, using Whiskies and possibly some other spirits from our local distilleries such as Poitín or Gin or Vodka or even Rum.

You’ll get to make the cocktails, after our well versed and experienced mixologists walk you through the step by step process of making bespoke Cocktails designed for the festival.

This Session will use 1 Whiskey, 1 Poitín and 1 Gin from the Shortcross Distillery range.

Looking Back

Angel & 2 Bibles has become something of a spiritual home for Belfast Whiskey Week's cocktail programme over the past four years — and not without good reason. There's a duchas to this venue, a sense that it belongs to Belfast in the way a good pub should: full of character, layered with history, and entirely without pretension. The quirky, nostalgic interiors provided the perfect backdrop for an afternoon of serious mixing, and the venue's experienced mixologists proved once again that their craft sits comfortably at the top of the city's cocktail scene.

Shortcross, rooted in the grounds of Rademon Estate in County Down, brings a distinctly Ulster character to everything it produces. Their whiskey carries the quiet confidence of a distillery still finding its full voice, while their gin — one of Ireland's most celebrated — has long punched well above its weight. To add poitín into the mix was a bold and thoroughly welcome move, a nod to the older, wilder tradition of Irish spirits-making, the kind of liquid history that lives in the seanchas of every rural townland in the north. Having all three on the worktop at once made for a rich, layered session.

The format was straightforward in the best possible way. The mixologists walked guests through three original cocktails designed specifically for the festival — step by step, measure by measure — before inviting everyone to make the drinks themselves. There's something genuinely transformative about having a Shortcross whiskey cocktail in your hand that you built with your own two hands. The poitín drink, in particular, generated a good deal of conversation: its raw, agricultural energy sitting in productive tension with the more refined botanical notes of the gin-based creation.

This session sat within a wider cocktail-making strand that ran every day throughout BWW2025 — each day a different distillery, each session a different set of flavours. Titanic Whiskey took the reins on another afternoon, while Hinch Distillery brought their southern County Down sensibility to the same bar. Shortcross, though, brought something particular: the range to fill three cocktails from a single distillery's portfolio, which speaks to just how seriously the Rademon Estate team has built their craft spirits range. Sláinte to that kind of ambition.

At £25 a head, this was among the most accessible and rewarding experiences of the festival week — the kind of session that leaves you not just with a pleasant afternoon's memory, but with actual knowledge you can carry home to your own kitchen. If you missed it this year, keep an eye on the Whiskey Map for everything Shortcross-related across the island, and make a note to book early in 2026. Sessions like this fill fast, and rightly so.