Spirit of Ballyhackamore: Belfast Whiskey Week 2024 Neighbourhood Session

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

Filed: 27 Jul 2024
By: Belfast Whiskey Week
Read: 3 min
Ref: BWW/24/948

There are festival events, and then there are those rare occasions when a festival steps outside itself and becomes something more — something that belongs to a place as much as a programme. The Spirit of Ballyhackamore session at Belfast Whiskey Week 2024 was precisely that: a joyful, open-armed celebration that brought the uisce beatha out of the tasting room and onto the street, welcoming everyone from seasoned whiskey enthusiasts to curious neighbours who simply followed the sound of a fiddle.

About This Event

Welcome to the Spirit of Ballyhackamore: A Whiskey Neighbourhood. This year's Festival pushes out into the Belfast Neighbourhoods and looks to harness the Spirit of Ballyhackamore by delivering a Free "Family Friendly" Event where Festival Goers of ALL Ages can Enjoy Live Music, Storytelling and Food on the street close to Hearth. Alternatively, if you want to taste whiskies and take part in a MasterClass, Whiskey Sampling, Cocktail Tasting and take in some Comedy, Theatre and Song, then it's £15 for the Craic! More info about this Neighbourhood Event will be listed here shortly.

Looking Back

Ballyhackamore — Baile Átha Comar to give it its full duchas — has long been one of Belfast's most characterful quarters, a stretch of east Belfast alive with independent spirit and a genuine sense of tír. On the 27th of July 2024, the neighbourhood leaned into that identity fully as Belfast Whiskey Week made it one of the festival's headline destinations. The streets close to Hearth were given over to live music, storytelling and food, and the whole thing was completely free — a deliberate, generous gesture that said whiskey culture belongs to everyone, not just those with a ticket in their pocket.

For families and casual visitors, the outdoor programme offered exactly what it promised: a warm summer afternoon's craic, with seanchas-style storytelling woven between sets of live music and the kind of street food that keeps Belfast's food scene punching well above its weight. There was an ease to it all — children running between stalls, neighbours pausing on their way home, visitors from further afield soaking up a side of the city that doesn't always make the tourist trail. It was neighbourly in the truest sense of the word.

For those ready to go deeper into the glass, the £15 ticketed strand delivered a rich programme of whiskey sampling, cocktail tasting, a MasterClass, comedy, theatre and song — a reminder that whiskey culture in Ireland has always been about more than what's in the bottle. The MasterClass element sat comfortably alongside the broader entertainment, and for anyone who wanted to understand the liquid they were enjoying, there was genuine learning on offer. If the Bushmills heritage sessions explored elsewhere in the festival — such as the Bushmills History MasterClass or the deep-dive Bushmills Causeway Collection MasterClass — represented the scholarly end of the programme, then Ballyhackamore represented its beating heart.

What made this event genuinely special was its refusal to be exclusive. Belfast Whiskey Week has always understood that the best whiskey experiences are shared ones, but the Spirit of Ballyhackamore session took that philosophy and built an entire afternoon around it. The decision to create a free, all-ages outer ring around the ticketed whiskey programme was inspired — it meant that the festival met the neighbourhood on its own terms, rather than asking the neighbourhood to come to the festival. Sláinte to that instinct. You can explore the full range of sessions from Belfast Whiskey Week 2024 on our Whiskey Map, which traces the festival's reach across the city and beyond.

The Spirit of Ballyhackamore was one of those events that lingers in the memory not because of a single extraordinary dram, but because of the cumulative warmth of the thing — the sheugh of a Belfast summer evening, the sound spilling down the street, the sense that whiskey had briefly dissolved the usual boundaries between enthusiast and novice, local and visitor, serious and playful. That, in the end, is what uisce beatha is supposed to do.