Transportation Whiskey Tasting – 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: 4 min
Ref: BWW/25/500

There are moments during Belfast Whiskey Week when a room tilts slightly off its axis — when something arrives from so far away that it reframes everything you thought you knew about uisce beatha. Session 57 of BWW 2025 was exactly that kind of moment. On a Tuesday lunchtime in the Duke of York, Tasmania came to Belfast, and the fifty souls who pulled up a stool were all the richer for it.

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 billing read Tasmanian Whiskies: Session 3, but that modest label barely contained what unfolded over those ninety minutes. Killara, Hillwood, Transportation Whiskey, and the singular Belgrove were the four pillars of the afternoon, each one a dispatch from an island — off the coast of another island — that has become one of the most quietly astonishing whiskey-producing regions on the planet. If you've ever wondered where the next great whiskey frontier might lie, this was your answer, poured neat and served with a yarn.

The undisputed heart of the session was Peter Bignell of Belgrove, who arrived with all the easy authority of a man who has spent decades listening to his land. Peter farms, malts, distils, and bottles on his own property outside Kempton, and every word he offered was rooted in that duchas — that deep sense of belonging to a place. He spoke about rye, about soil, about seasons that don't behave as they should, and about a conviction that whiskey ought to tell you something true. The room was rapt. You don't encounter that kind of seanchas — that living, inherited knowledge — often in a tasting room, and when you do, you feel it.

Transportation Whiskey brought its own compelling story to the table. A Tasmanian single pot still expression, triple distilled and built squarely on Irish whiskey tradition, Transportation is Australian in provenance and Irish in method and spirit — which made its presence at a Belfast festival feel less like coincidence and more like homecoming. The dram delivered on every count: elegant and structured, with that characteristic triple-distilled smoothness underpinned by something wilder and more windswept beneath. The brand has become a recurring and valued presence across BWW's Tasmanian programme, and its appearance here alongside the other island distilleries gave the session a coherent, unhurried narrative arc.

The talking point that had ticket-holders checking their watches before the doors even opened was the exclusive bottling: fifty bottles of a BWW Belgrove X Transportation collaboration, available only to those in the room. At £15 for the full session, this was — as promised — exceptional value, and the exclusives moved quickly. Those who secured one left carrying something genuinely scarce and genuinely special. If you attended Session 1 of the Tasmanian programme earlier in the week, you'll have had some preparation for the quality on offer here; if Session 57 was your introduction to these distilleries, the effect was probably closer to revelation.

Hillwood and Killara rounded out the line-up with their own distinctive registers — Hillwood's approachability belying its craft credentials, Killara bringing a more assertive character that sparked genuine debate around the tables. Taken together, the four distilleries made a compelling case that Tasmania is not merely mimicking the old whiskey nations but developing a tír and a terroir of its own. Sláinte to every distiller, every pourer, and every curious soul who found their way to the Duke of York that afternoon. The sheugh between Belfast and Hobart felt, for a while, considerably narrower than a map would suggest. Keep an eye on the full Whiskey Map to trace where these remarkable drams come from.