Tasmanian Whiskies Session 1 | Transportation Whiskey | 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/25/156

There are few moments in a whiskey festival that carry quite the charge of genuine discovery — and the Tasmanian Whiskies Session 1 at Belfast Whiskey Week 2025 was precisely that kind of afternoon. Held at the beloved Duke of York on a bright July Saturday, this Straight Whiskey Tasting brought together four of Tasmania's most compelling distilleries, with Transportation Whiskey at the heart of something quietly remarkable: a limited collaborative bottling that made the £15 ticket feel almost indecently generous.

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.

Come meet Peter Bignell as he imparts vast amounts of 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!!

Looking Back

The phrase uisce beatha — water of life — carries a long memory in this part of the world. What struck many at this session was how naturally that memory had travelled. Transportation Whiskey is a Tasmanian single pot still whiskey, triple distilled, built deliberately on Irish whiskey tradition: Australian in provenance, Irish in method and in spirit. In a room full of Belfast whiskey drinkers, that lineage didn't need explaining. It was tasted and understood almost immediately.

The session's centrepiece was the exclusive BWW x Belgrove x Transportation bottling — just 50 bottles, available only to ticket holders on the day. These sold as fast as you'd expect, and the few who hesitated found themselves watching others walk away with something they knew, in their bones, was rare. Peter Bignell of Belgrove was in the room, and his presence transformed what might have been a straightforward tasting into something closer to seanchas — a living transmission of knowledge and passion direct from the source. The man farms his own rye, runs his own stills, and still speaks about whiskey with the wonder of someone who can't quite believe his luck. That enthusiasm was, as the event promised, genuinely infectious.

Alongside the exclusive bottling, glasses were poured from Belgrove, Hillwood, and Killara — four distinct expressions of what a small island perched off the southern coast of Australia has been quietly achieving over the past decade or so. Hillwood's fruit-forward character offered a gentle counterpoint to Belgrove's earthier, more agricultural notes; Killara sat somewhere in between, elegant and precise. Tasted in sequence, they told the story of a whiskey region still in the early chapters of its dúchas — its inheritance — but writing those chapters with considerable confidence.

This wasn't a session that tried to compete with the grandeur of single malt Scotland or the heritage heft of Kentucky. Its power lay elsewhere: in the intimacy, the accessibility, and the sheer improbability of sitting in a snug Belfast bar on a Saturday afternoon sipping whiskey made on the other side of the world by people who looked to Ireland for their template. If you'd missed it and wanted to see how Transportation Whiskey fits into the broader BWW programme, the Tasmanian Whiskies Session 2 ran later in the week and offered another chance to explore this remarkable island's output. For those curious about where Tasmanian whiskey sits in the wider world spirits conversation, World Whiskies Session 1 provided useful and delicious context.

At £15 for a tasting of this calibre, the event delivered on every promise it made. Sláinte to the Tasmanians — and to the festival that keeps finding ways to bring the world's most interesting whiskey makers to the north of Ireland.