Tullamore DEW Warehouse MasterClass – Belfast Whiskey Week 2021

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

Filed: 25 Jul 2021
By: Belfast Whiskey Week
Read: 3 min
Format: Online Tasting
Ref: BWW/21/620

On the evening of 25th July 2021, Belfast Whiskey Week's Session 95 opened the doors — virtually, but no less vividly — to the Tullamore DEW warehouse, offering a masterclass that felt less like a tasting and more like being let quietly into a confidence. Six exclusive 50ml samples, some of them spirits the wider world hadn't yet tasted, made this one of the most talked-about events of BWW2021.

About This Event

This tasting includes 6 x 50ml Samples and will take place on the 25th @ 19:00.

This tasting comprises of exclusive spirits sampled from the Tullamore DEW Warehouse, including unreleased tastes of spirit produced at their distillery opened in 2014:

New Make
New Make "Hudson"
Single Pot Still - Sherry Cask
Single Malt
Single Grain
13 Year Old - Pomerol Red Wine Cask

Tasting packs will be posted out to you, but may not arrive in time for the tastings. If you wish to collect the pack in Belfast to ensure you have it in time, please contact grace@belfastwhiskeyweek.com after you order.

Looking Back

There's a particular kind of stillness to a whiskey warehouse — the low light, the slow breath of the casks, what the old people might call the duchas of a place settling into its spirit. Tullamore DEW brought something of that atmosphere into Session 95, even across the distance of a screen and a postal tasting pack. The brand, rooted in the heart of County Offaly since 1829 and reborn at its purpose-built Tullamore distillery opened in 2014, has always been defined by its triple-distillate character — blend, single malt, and single pot still working together like old neighbours. But this masterclass was something different: a look behind the curtain at what that 2014 distillery has been quietly maturing.

The lineup was extraordinary by any measure. Attendees moved through a new make spirit — raw, unaged, the uisce beatha at its most honest and unguarded — before encountering what was labelled the "Hudson" New Make Single Pot Still, a spirit carrying the bold, oily grain-and-fruit signature that pot still lovers will know immediately. These were not finished products; they were conversations about what Irish whiskey becomes, offered to people willing to listen. For many in the room — or rather, in their living rooms across Belfast and beyond — it was a first encounter with spirit at this stage of its life, and that novelty was palpable in the post-event chatter.

The sherry cask single malt offered a counterpoint: warmth, dried fruit, a gentle nuttiness that suggested patience had been richly rewarded. But the undoubted centrepiece of the evening was the 13 Year Old Single Grain finished in a Pomerol red wine cask — a genuinely rare and unreleased expression that gave the session its collector's edge. Pomerol, that small but storied corner of Bordeaux, lends a particular softness and vinous depth, and in a grain whiskey already shaped by over a decade in wood, the effect was something approaching the elegant. This was seanchas in liquid form — old knowledge, quietly preserved and carefully shared.

What elevated Session 95 above a simple tasting was the generosity of access it represented. Tullamore DEW did not send out their catalogue; they sent out their working materials, their experiments, their futures. That spirit of openness sat comfortably alongside other ambitious masterclasses in the BWW2021 programme — if you found yourself drawn to deep-dive distillery sessions, Session 83's exploration of Bushmills history covered similarly rich archival territory, while the Bushmills Causeway Collection MasterClass offered another evening of rare and considered Irish whiskey. The festival, at its best, creates these moments of genuine connection between maker and drinker — and Session 95 was exactly that.

At £80, the evening represented real value for what was on offer — six samples you could not have procured elsewhere, the knowledge of the people guiding the session, and the rare pleasure of tasting a distillery's ambitions before the rest of the world catches up. For those who collected their packs in Belfast rather than waiting on the post, there was also the small, satisfying ritual of picking up something precious in the city that has become a quiet capital of Irish whiskey appreciation. Sláinte mhaith to everyone who raised a glass that Sunday evening — you were in good company, even from afar.