Transportation Whiskey Tasting | 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/24/172

Some journeys are worth every mile — and when Transportation Whiskey, Spring Bay, and Belgrove touched down in Belfast for Session 43 of Belfast Whiskey Week 2024, the Duke of York in Commercial Court was ready to welcome them like old friends returning from a long voyage. This fifth Tasmanian session brought together three of the island's most distinctive voices for an evening of straight whiskey tasting that felt, in the best possible way, like uisce beatha without borders.

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 fifth session, you get the opportunity to sample whiskey from Spring Bay, Belgrove & Transportation Whiskey in the Historic and ever popular bar for whiskey drinkers - The Duke of York!

Looking Back

There is something quietly extraordinary about a distillery built on the southern edge of the world looking north to Ireland for its soul. Transportation Whiskey is precisely that — a Tasmanian single pot still whiskey, triple distilled, carrying the duchas of Irish whiskey tradition in every dram. Australian in provenance, Irish in method and spirit, it arrived at the Duke of York with a story that needed no embellishment. The name alone — Transportation — carries the weight of colonial history and the defiant act of making something beautiful from displacement. For an audience in Belfast, a city that knows a thing or two about resilience and reinvention, that resonance was not lost.

The Duke of York, tucked into the cobbled intimacy of Commercial Court in the Cathedral Quarter, is one of those bars that earns its reputation quietly, over decades. Its walls hold the seanchas of Belfast's drinking life — a place where conversation flows as naturally as the whiskey, and where a well-chosen dram feels like punctuation rather than performance. It was, in short, the right room for this kind of evening. The low lighting, the timber and tile, the unhurried pace — all of it conspired to make forty-five minutes with three Tasmanian distilleries feel like considerably longer, in the finest possible sense.

Alongside Transportation, attendees had the chance to explore Spring Bay and Belgrove, two distilleries that together paint a broad and compelling picture of what Tasmanian whisky has become in recent years. Spring Bay brings a maritime character shaped by its east coast home, while Belgrove — perhaps the most singular of the trio — operates on a scale and with a philosophy that borders on the devotional, its rye-forward expressions grown and distilled by one man on one farm. Three distilleries, three very different stories, one island. The comparison proved illuminating without ever feeling forced, and guests left with a genuine sense of a whisky region still in the act of discovering itself.

This session was the fifth in BWW 2024's dedicated Tasmanian programme, a strand that has grown year on year into one of the festival's most beloved and distinctive offerings. That the distilleries themselves made the journey from the other side of the world — nearly seventeen thousand kilometres — to pour their whiskey in Belfast speaks volumes about the relationships Belfast Whiskey Week has built. For those who wanted to explore the Irish tradition that underpins Transportation's craft from a different angle, the festival also offered a rich seam of local heritage: the Bushmills History MasterClass traced the roots of Irish distilling with characteristic depth, while the Bushmills Cask Strength Mini-MasterClass brought that tradition right up to the glass. Taken together, an evening in the company of Transportation and a session with Bushmills offered a quietly profound conversation across continents and centuries.

At £15 a ticket, Session 43 was one of those straightforward pleasures the festival does so well — accessible, generous, and free of pretension. The Straight Whiskey Tasting format suited the setting and the spirits perfectly: no lengthy lectures, no unnecessary ceremony, just three fine drams, good company, and the particular warmth that the Duke of York seems to generate without effort. Sláinte to Tasmania, and sláinte to everyone who made the considerably shorter journey down to Commercial Court that evening.