Spot Whiskeys Colour Cocktails MasterClass | 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/25/676

Colour has always carried meaning in the story of Irish whiskey, and few ranges wear that truth more proudly than the Spot family. On a July Sunday afternoon at Belfast Whiskey Week 2025, Spot Whiskeys and the award-winning mixologists at Liquid Minds invited guests into a session that was equal parts sensory experiment and sheer cocktail pleasure — a masterclass where the glass told the whole story.

About This Event

From a period in time when Casks of whiskey were identified by a splash of paint, Spot Whiskies have served as a lasting memory of whiskey production over 100 years in Ireland. We are delighted to collaborate with Liquid Minds, in presenting 4 bespoke cocktails using the Red, Blue, Yellow and Green Spot Whiskies. Each Whiskey has unique compositions, cask maturation and taste profiles, that are complimented in the coctails.

Allow your senses to explore the use of colour as a perception, enhancer or decision maker, while drinking some of the most exceptional whiskey cocktails to ever make it into a glass.

Be prepared to be wowed by the mixologists from Liquid Minds, who have conquered the world of Cocktail making and who love to impart their passion, with demonstrations, high calibre cocktails and distinct tastes.

Looking Back

Long before the language of tasting notes existed, Irish bonded merchants used a simple, practical shorthand: a splash of paint on a cask. Red. Blue. Yellow. Green. From that workaday mark of identification, Mitchell & Son built a legacy that now spans generations, and it was that legacy — that duchas, that inherited character — that gave this masterclass its spine. Liquid Minds didn't just use the Spot range as a cocktail base; they treated each expression as a distinct argument, a personality deserving its own translation into the glass.

Four bespoke cocktails were built around the four Spot expressions, each one designed to amplify rather than obscure. Green Spot, with its orchard-fresh brightness and honeyed pot still weight, anchored one creation. Yellow Spot's Marsala cask depth — richer, spicier, carrying that extra age with quiet authority — informed another. Red Spot, matured in Jamaican rum casks and bursting with tropical exuberance, clearly inspired the most theatrical of the four. And Blue Spot, that rare ex-bourbon cask release bottled at cask strength, demanded something bold enough to meet it on its own terms. The Liquid Minds team rose to each challenge without a stumble.

What made the session genuinely memorable wasn't just the quality of the drinks — though they were exceptional — it was the deliberate invitation to think about perception. How does colour prime the palate? Does a red cocktail taste bolder simply because we expect it to? The team walked guests through each pairing with real intellectual engagement, weaving the sensory science lightly into the tasting without turning the afternoon into a lecture. The room — drawn from curious first-timers and seasoned whiskey drinkers alike — leaned in. That's the mark of a well-judged masterclass. This event sat comfortably alongside the wider cocktail programme at BWW 2025; those who wanted to explore the craft further could find similar craft and imagination at the Belfast Boiler Makers session or the Cocktail Making with Limavady & Outwalker event, each offering its own distinct take on what Irish whiskey can become in skilled hands.

The Spot family, produced at Midleton for Mitchell & Son, carries something rare in the modern whiskey world: a direct, unbroken line to the bonded merchant tradition. Green, Yellow, Red, Blue — they are not simply variants in a range but expressions of different ideas about what pot still Irish whiskey can be at different ages, in different casks, under different conditions. Liquid Minds understood this instinctively, and their cocktails felt like genuine collaborations with the liquid rather than exercises in dressing it up. The uisce beatha was always central.

For those who missed this one, it remains a benchmark for what a whiskey cocktail masterclass should aspire to be — anchored in provenance, delivered with craft, and generous enough in spirit to leave every guest with both a fuller glass and a sharper understanding of what they were drinking. Sláinte mhaith to everyone who was in the room. You were lucky, and you knew it.