Whiskey Through the Decades Part 2 | 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: 3 min
Ref: BWW/25/820

There are tastings, and then there are moments of genuine seanchas — sessions where the liquid in the glass carries the full weight of living memory. Whiskey Through the Decades: Part 2, held at the Duke of York on the afternoon of 21st July 2025, was firmly in the latter category. A Straight Whiskey Tasting unlike almost anything else on the Belfast Whiskey Week calendar, it brought together rare bottlings from the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s — uisce beatha made by hands that have long since stilled.

About This Event

Historic Whiskey Tastings do do come any cheaper than this. I suppose we could have charged £200 per ticket, and it still wouldn’t cover the charge of the cost of these whiskies in a bar.

With Whiskey from the 1950’s, 1960’s, 1970’s and 1980’s - you’ll have a great opportunity to taste whiskies that have lasted longer than most Distilleries.

Be prepared to be part of history, while tasting whiskies made by men and women who are no longer part of this world. Their motives and memories live through the liquid we may taste.

Vintage. High-End Tasting that Screams Opulence and Heritage.

Looking Back

To walk into the Duke of York for this session was to feel the particular hush that descends when something irreplaceable is about to be opened. The venue itself — all etched glass, dark wood, and the accumulated atmosphere of Commercial Court — was the right setting for it. Some rooms suit reverence. This was one of them. Tickets were priced at £55, a figure that, as the event itself acknowledged with characteristic candour, could scarcely begin to reflect the real-world cost of these whiskies poured across a bar. That honesty set the tone from the outset: this was about access, not theatre.

The lineup spanned four decades, each dram a small act of archaeological recovery. Whiskies from the 1950s carry a different gravity entirely — they predate the great wave of distillery closures that reshaped both Irish and Scotch whisky landscapes, and they speak to production methods, grain profiles, and cask regimes that are genuinely lost to time. Moving forward through the 1960s and 1970s, attendees could trace subtle shifts in character: the evolution of blending philosophy, the influence of different wood policies, the faint signatures of distilleries that no longer exist. By the time the 1980s expressions arrived, they felt almost contemporary by comparison — and yet even those were approaching or past their fortieth year in the world.

What elevated the session beyond mere spectacle was the conversation it invited. The people who distilled and bottled these whiskies are, in many cases, no longer living. Their craft survives only in sealed glass, and every cork pulled is, in a quiet sense, a final farewell. That weight was present in the room — not mournfully, but with the kind of grateful recognition that the Irish word dúchas gestures toward: an inheritance received with care. Attendees weren't passive consumers here. They were custodians of something finite.

For those who missed this session, it's worth knowing that Belfast Whiskey Week 2025 offered a rich programme of rare and world-class experiences across the week. The World Whiskies: Session 1 and its counterpart World Whiskies: Session 2 brought a broader geographic sweep to the festival, while events like the Glens of Antrim: Lir Whiskey Tasting kept the focus closer to home, rooted in the tír that gives Irish whiskey so much of its character. Together, they formed a programme that rewarded curiosity at every level.

Vintage tastings of this calibre are rare anywhere in the world, let alone available at a price point designed to welcome genuine enthusiasts rather than only the deep-pocketed. Belfast Whiskey Week has always understood that great whiskey belongs to curious people, not just wealthy ones — and Whiskey Through the Decades: Part 2 was perhaps the clearest expression of that belief in the 2025 festival. Sláinte to everyone who raised a glass to those long-gone distillers. Their work deserved the company.