Tasmanian Whiskies & Echlinville | BWW 2024 Session Review

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

Filed: 21 Jul 2024
By: Belfast Whiskey Week
Read: 4 min
Ref: BWW/24/812

There are nights at Belfast Whiskey Week that quietly become the ones people talk about for months afterwards, and Session 27 at the Dark Horse on 21st July 2024 was exactly that kind of evening. Two producers who had flown from the other end of the earth — Killara Distillery and Transportation Whiskey — took their seats alongside one of Northern Ireland's own great distilling stories, Echlinville, for the third and final chapter of the festival's dedicated Tasmanian sessions. It was a straight whiskey tasting in the truest sense: no ceremony beyond the glass, the pour, and the conversation.

About This Event

We Welcome back our friends from Tasmania! We are delighted that they have flown halfway round the world to get involved in Belfast Whiskey Week - Let's get out and support them this year! In this third session, you get the opportunity to sample whiskey from Killara, Transportation Whiskey and Special guests: Echlinville in the Historic and Distinct - Dark Horse

Looking Back

The Dark Horse on Hill Street is one of those Belfast institutions that earns the word distinct without having to try. Low-lit, historically layered, and with enough character in its walls to do half the storytelling for you, it was a fitting tir for an evening that spanned two hemispheres. By the time the room had filled and the first drams were being poured, the atmosphere already had that easy warmth — the duchas, you might say — that the best whiskey events seem to generate naturally, without effort or management.

Killara Distillery, situated in the cool highlands of Tasmania's Derwent Valley, brought with them the quiet confidence of a producer who knows exactly what their land gives them. Their whiskeys carry a freshness and a fruit-forward brightness that felt genuinely revelatory to many in the room encountering them for the first time — elegant drams that wore their southern-hemisphere origins lightly but unmistakably. Transportation Whiskey, meanwhile, offered something altogether more robust and storied in concept: a brand whose identity nods knowingly to Tasmania's convict past, bringing a welcome edge of seanchas to proceedings. The two producers together made a compelling argument that Tasmania is no longer a curiosity on the world whiskey map — it is a destination. If you haven't explored that corner of the world yet, our Whiskey Map is a good place to start tracing the journey.

But the evening's most pleasurable surprise — at least for those who hadn't followed the festival programme closely — was the presence of Echlinville as special guests. When Echlinville was granted its distilling licence, it became the first new distillery to open in Northern Ireland for more than 125 years, and that founding ambition remains visible in everything they produce today. Rooted firmly in the Ards Peninsula estate where they grow their own barley, Echlinville represents something increasingly rare in modern whiskey: genuine provenance, grain to glass, in the soil of Ulster itself. Pouring alongside two Tasmanian producers, they held their own with quiet authority — a reminder that world-class whiskey is being made in our own back yard. You can explore their full range through our Echlinville Distillery collection.

Echlinville are, of course, no strangers to the festival. They are one of BWW's anchor presences, appearing across Distillery Days, the Whiskey Expo, and headline masterclasses including their celebrated Dunville's Green Label sessions. Seeing them in a more informal tasting format here — shoulder to shoulder with producers from the Antipodes — was a different kind of pleasure. The contrast sharpened both, and the conversation in the room between pours was lively, curious, and occasionally very funny. That easy cross-cultural exchange, over shared glasses, is exactly what BWW exists to create. It is, at its best, a sheugh-crossing exercise in the very finest sense.

Session 27 was priced at £30, and by any measure it represented fair value for what the room received: three distinct whiskey identities, an atmospheric venue, and the rare chance to ask your questions directly of the people who make the spirit. For those who want to revisit the event listing, the Session 27 product page remains available. And if the broader Ulster whiskey story has caught your interest, the Bushmills sessions from previous festival years offer a rich seam of further exploration — sláinte to everyone who made the night what it was.