Teeling Cocktail Masterclass | Belfast Whiskey Week 2024

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

Filed: 23 Jul 2024
By: Belfast Whiskey Week
Read: 3 min
Ref: BWW/24/548

There's a particular kind of craic that happens when good whiskey meets willing hands and a shaker — and on 23rd July 2024, that craic was in full flow at Angel & 2 Bibles. Session 49 of Belfast Whiskey Week brought together the bold spirit of Teeling Distillery and the considerable craft of the venue's own mixologists for a cocktail masterclass that was equal parts education and sheer good fun.

About This Event

The fantastic mixologists at Angel & 2 Bibles are here to deliver a hands-on Cocktail Making MasterClass where you will get to make and drink 3 Whiskey Cocktails using whiskies from the Teeling Distillery. Test yourself, bring some friends, show off and have some fun while learning a wee bit about Cocktail construction and Whiskey production.

Looking Back

Teeling is a distillery that has never been shy about challenging convention. When it opened its doors in the Liberties of Dublin in 2015 — the first new whiskey distillery in the city in over 125 years — it announced itself not just as a producer of fine uisce beatha, but as a statement of intent for Irish whiskey's future. That spirit of confident reinvention made it a natural fit for Belfast Whiskey Week, and the cocktail masterclass format gave attendees a chance to engage with the liquid on their own terms, shaker in hand.

The session was led by the mixologists at Angel & 2 Bibles, a venue that knows its way around a bar counter. Over the course of the evening, participants made and drank three whiskey cocktails built around Teeling's range — each one a small lesson in how whiskey interacts with other flavours, how balance is achieved, and why the base spirit matters so much. For those who might have arrived thinking cocktails were a distraction from whiskey rather than a route into it, the session made a quietly convincing argument to the contrary.

There was a lovely duchas to the evening — a sense of inherited generosity, of knowledge passed between hands rather than delivered from a lectern. No one felt talked down to. The masterclass format invited questions, encouraged mistakes, and rewarded curiosity. Attendees who brought friends found the shared experience made the learning stick in a way that a tasting alone might not. By the third cocktail, the room had found its rhythm, and the conversation was flowing as freely as the pours.

For those who wanted to dig deeper into the craft of whiskey education at BWW, sessions like the Bushmills History Masterclass and the Bushmills Causeway Collection Masterclass offered different angles on the same broader pleasure — understanding what's in the glass by understanding where it came from. The Teeling session sat comfortably alongside these as proof that there are many ways into the world of Irish whiskey, and none of them need be intimidating.

At £35, this was a session that gave back considerably more than it asked for. Three cocktails, hands-on instruction, a grounding in Teeling's approach to cask finishes and blending philosophy, and an evening spent in good company in one of Belfast's most characterful bars. Sláinte to everyone who pulled up a stool. If this kind of session appears in the programme again, book early.