Tasmanian Whiskey Dinner 2025 – Transportation & Belfast Whiskey Week

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

Filed: 15 Jul 2025
By: Belfast Whiskey Week
Read: 4 min
Ref: BWW/25/340

Some traditions earn their place not through repetition but through revelation — and the Tasmanian Whiskey Dinner at Belfast Whiskey Week 2025 proved, once again, why this particular gathering has become one of the most anticipated nights on the festival calendar. Held at the Deer's Head Music Hall on the evening of 22nd July, the event brought together four of Tasmania's most distinctive distilleries — Belgrove, Killara, Hillwood, and Transportation Whiskey — for a bespoke three-course dinner that was as much a celebration of duchas as it was of dram. Fifty lucky souls pulled up a chair, and by all accounts, not one of them left anything but well fed, well poured, and thoroughly converted.

About This Event

We welcome back our friends from the Island off the Island of Australia; Tasmania.

Killara, Transportation, Hillwood and of course the famous Belgrove.

Belfast Whiskey Week wouldn’t be the same if it didn’t have a Tasmanian Whiskey Dinner - It’s Tradition!

John Halton Joins us, as does Peter Bignell as they both bring the craic and knowledge straight from the stills. You’ll be blown away by the passion the Tasmanians have about their whiskies! There is a real sense of pride and conviction.

Please note there are 50 limited BWW Belgrove X Transportation Exclusive Bottlings available - if you want one - grab a ticket. There will also be whiskies from Belgrove, Hillwood & Killara available….

You’ll not get a better value anywhere else in Ireland for a tasting of this magnitude!!

A bespoke 3 Course Meal with the celebrated Johnny Stephenson, complimented with Tasmanian Whiskies, including a few undisclosed bottles.

Looking Back

There is something quietly remarkable about the relationship between Belfast and Tasmania. Two islands, one tucked off the north-east tip of Ireland, the other hanging at the southern edge of the world — and yet, when the whiskey is poured, the conversation flows as though the sheugh between them is nothing more than a puddle. Peter Bignell of Belgrove was in rare form, his passion for his farm distillery — one of the most singular operations in the whiskey world — cutting through the room with the easy authority of a man who has spent years coaxing something extraordinary from rye and Tasmanian soil. Beside him, John Halton brought the knowledge and warmth that seasoned Belfast Whiskey Week regulars have come to expect. Together, they anchored an evening that never felt like a performance — it felt like seanchas, like the kind of genuine knowledge-sharing that only happens when people truly love what they do.

Transportation Whiskey occupied a particularly special corner of the night. Tasmanian in provenance but Irish in method and spirit, Transportation is a single pot still whiskey, triple distilled — and for a Belfast audience, that lineage lands with something close to recognition. The exclusive BWW x Belgrove x Transportation collaborative bottling, limited to just fifty bottles and available only to ticket holders, was the kind of thing that whiskey lovers quietly obsess over for years afterwards. If you were in the room, you had first refusal. If you weren't — well, that's precisely why you book early. You can explore the full Transportation Whiskey range here, though the exclusive bottling was, by its nature, a once-only affair.

Chef Johnny Stephenson's three-course menu held its own admirably against such distinguished liquid company. The food was bespoke and considered — not a distraction from the whiskey, but a genuine partner to it, each course offering a platform for the pours that followed. The undisclosed bottles were a particular talking point; there is a particular pleasure in tasting something without the label doing the thinking for you, and more than one attendee was surprised by what they reached for first. Hillwood and Killara rounded out the pours with their own distinct characters — Hillwood's elegance and Killara's more robust, fruit-forward profile offering contrast and conversation in equal measure.

This was not the only time Tasmania came to town during BWW 2025. The island distilleries also featured in Tasmanian Tasting Session 2/4: Hobart, Launceston, Transportation Whiskey & Hunter Island and returned for Tasmanian Tasting Session 4/4: Spring Bay, Killara, Transportation Whiskey & Hunter Island — but there is something about the dinner format, with the intimacy of a table and the unhurried time to talk, that the standalone tastings, brilliant as they are, cannot quite replicate. The dinner is where the relationships deepen. It is where you find yourself asking the distiller a question you had been turning over for years, and receiving an answer that sends you back to the glass with new eyes.

At £40 a head for a three-course meal, an evening of guided pours, exclusive bottlings, and direct access to two of Tasmania's most compelling voices in whiskey, the value was — as we said at the time and say again now — not to be found anywhere else in Ireland. Sláinte mhaith to Peter, John, and every one of the fifty who made it through the door. The uisce beatha was good, the tír from which it came was well represented, and the tradition, it's safe to say, will continue. If you want to see where in the world these remarkable whiskies are being made, take a look at our Whiskey Map — Tasmania, we think you'll agree, punches well above its weight.