WolfBurn Introduction Tasting – Belfast Whiskey Week 2021

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

Filed: 23 Jul 2021
By: Belfast Whiskey Week
Read: 3 min
Ref: BWW/21/812

When Belfast Whiskey Week 2021 turned its gaze northward across the sheugh and beyond, it found a kindred spirit in WolfBurn — a distillery that sits at the very tip of the Scottish mainland, where the land runs out and the sea takes over. Session 17 was an Introduction tasting, designed to open the door for those new to this remarkable Caithness single malt, and on the afternoon of 23rd July it did exactly that, welcoming whiskey lovers from Belfast to Brisbane and everywhere in between.

About This Event

This tasting includes 3 x 50ml Samples & Glass and will take place on the 23rd @ 16:00.

For those in the USA, Australia, Sweden, Europe, the Republic of Ireland or Northern Ireland, you will be able to save on delivery costs by having your package to sent to a localised depot for collection. You will be charged a small fee upon collection, but the cost will be much cheaper than having packs delivered to individual addresses. If you would like to avail of this option, please make a note in the Special Instructions box, and we will contact you at a later date to arrange this and refund your delivery charges.

Looking Back

There is something quietly defiant about WolfBurn. Sitting near Thurso on the far northern coast of Scotland, it is among the most remote working distilleries in the country, and yet it carries none of the self-conscious ruggedness that such a location might invite. The whisky it makes is precise, elegant, and honest — qualities that made it a natural fit for an Introduction session at a festival that has always valued substance over spectacle. For many of the attendees gathered around their screens on that July afternoon, this was their first encounter with the brand, and it proved a memorable one.

The format was straightforward and all the better for it: three fifty-millilitre samples, a tasting glass, and a guided journey through WolfBurn's character. That simplicity was the point. An Introduction session at Belfast Whiskey Week has always been about building a foundation — giving participants the language and the landmarks they need to understand a whisky on its own terms before the complexity is layered on. With WolfBurn, the duchas of the place came through clearly: something coastal, something clean, something that speaks of open skies and peaty earth without shouting about it.

One of the quiet triumphs of BWW 2021 was its ability to reach a genuinely international audience. Participants in the USA, Australia, Sweden, across Europe, and throughout Ireland — both north and south — were able to join through a thoughtfully arranged depot collection system that kept costs manageable and packs moving. It meant that the seanchas of a session like this one — the shared knowledge, the communal tasting, the sláinte raised in a dozen time zones — felt genuinely earned rather than logistically compromised. The global spread of the audience gave the evening a texture that no in-person room could quite have replicated.

For those who wanted to go deeper into the week's Scottish and Irish offerings, BWW 2021 had plenty to offer on both sides of the water. The Session 22: Sexton Deconstruction Showcase offered a forensic look at one of Ireland's more distinctive single malts, while closer to home the Session 50: Bushmills Causeway Collection MasterClass took participants deep into the uisce beatha tradition of the Causeway Coast. Together with the WolfBurn Introduction, these sessions sketched a vivid geography of island whisky-making — different tír, shared craft.

Looking back, Session 17 stands as a fine example of what an Introduction tasting can achieve when the whisky is good and the guidance is clear. WolfBurn is a distillery that rewards attention, and Belfast Whiskey Week gave it the space to be heard. For anyone who picked up their sample pack that July and tasted something that surprised them, the door that was opened then is still very much open — and worth walking through again.