Walking With Marty: Irish Whiskey Tour | Belfast Whiskey Week 2023

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

Filed: 15 Jul 2023
By: Belfast Whiskey Week
Read: 5 min
Ref: BWW/23/660

Some events sit you down and pour whiskey at you. Marty McAuley's Walking With Marty took a different approach entirely — pulling on your coat, steering you out the door, and sending you off through the streets of Belfast with a dram in hand and a yarn in your ear. This three-hour walking tour, one of the standout sessions of Belfast Whiskey Week 2023, gathered a small, lucky crowd outside City Hall on the afternoon of Friday 28th October and didn't let them back to earth until the city had told them everything it had to say.

About This Event

There’s no easier way to put this: Put your comfy shoes on, dress for Belfast Weather, grab yer ticket and meet me at City Hall. I’ll be wearing clothes. Easy to find sure, with a Whiskey Week sign. Once all the stragglers get here - we’re off! Then it’s just me, you, and a handful of other chaps and lassies, as we dander about Belfast in search of good craic, good whiskey and good places to tell my stories. This walking tour is full of food, whiskies and me imparting the impartiality, expelling the experiences and holding forth the history of this Great Whiskey City. No need to eat before hand - I’ll feed and water you, promise - Marty McAuley Timeslot: 12pm-3pm Start Time: 12pm Duration: 3hrs Venue: Multiple Locations Drinks: 5 Drams Type: Walking Tour Walking: Be Prepared to Walk around Belfast. Some of the areas & venues may not be fully accessible, please contact us @belfastwhiskeyweek on socials, or via email on marketing@belfastwhiskeyweek.com or 07773675179 (8am-8pm) to discuss. Disclaimers Please note that individual dietary requirements are not being catered for with any food at this event. Each Brand/Distillery and Collaborative Partner have agreed to our Min/Max Pour Policy. Please Respect this, and enjoy your festival responsibly. Festival Participants who are deemed to be too inebriated, or are not respecting themselves, will not be permitted into events and venues. ALL Hosts/Ushers/Collaborators and Venue Staff have the right to refuse participants without question and recourse. Please Drink Responsibly. All events are only available to those 18 years old and over. Do not purchase tickets if you are under the age of 18. Be prepared to produce ID if required. Venue staff & ushers may ask you to provide ID when showing your valid tickets. You may be refused enter to events if you can’t prove your age. Some venues may change, if they do, you will be notified. All events are subject to changes out of the control of the festival organisers. Any issues, please contact us @belfastwhiskeyweek on socials, or via email on marketing@belfastwhiskeyweek.com or 07773675179 (8am-8pm) to discuss. NO Refunds will be given. Please only buy tickets if you are prepared to attend the event. Tickets are transferable. If you are going to transfer tickets please email, marketing@belfastwhiskeyweek.com

Looking Back

There's a particular kind of Belfast magic that only reveals itself on foot — in the cut of a side street, the weight of a Victorian doorframe, the smell of something good drifting out of a pub you'd never have noticed from a taxi window. Walking With Marty understood this instinctively. The tour began at City Hall, that great sandstone anchor of the city centre, where Marty — sign in hand, stories already loaded — gathered the group with the easy authority of a man who has never once been lost in his own town. What followed was less a guided tour and more a shared act of seanchas: the living tradition of storytelling, pressed into the streets and served alongside the uisce beatha.

Five drams across multiple venues gave the afternoon its structure, but it was Marty's narration that gave it its soul. He wore his knowledge of Belfast's whiskey history lightly, threading distillery stories and local lore through the walk without ever tipping into lecture. Participants weren't passive recipients — they were companions, drawn into the tale of what this city once was as a whiskey capital, what it lost, and what it has so determinedly reclaimed. Food was woven in too, just as promised, so that the afternoon never tipped into mere drinking and always felt like a genuine exploration of place and palate together.

The tour format — intimate, unhurried, rooted in tír — is one Belfast Whiskey Week has rightly championed across its programme. If Walking With Marty had a particular distinction among the festival's walking offerings, it was the personality at its centre. Marty McAuley is, frankly, a natural at this. Funny without trying, informative without showing off, and clearly in love with the city he was sharing. Those who caught an earlier session of the same tour will know the quality was consistent — this is not a performance that coasts.

For those curious about how this event fitted into the broader walking tour strand of BWW2023, it sat alongside strong companion events like Belfast Hidden Tours: Walking, Whiskies & Whispers and the much-loved Belfast Walking Tours: Belfast's Public Houses & Art Trail — together forming a loose trilogy of ways to know Belfast through its streets, its pubs, and its pour. Each took a different route, a different lens; all arrived at the same conclusion that this is a city worth knowing slowly and on foot.

At £50 for three hours, five drams, food, and the kind of company that makes a grey Friday afternoon feel like a privilege, Walking With Marty was one of the festival's most complete experiences. No brand sponsorship, no polished presentation deck — just a man, a city, and the deep, generous knowledge of someone who genuinely gives a damn. Sláinte, Marty. Same time next year.