Wood Cask Tasting at Belfast Whiskey Week 2025 | Par 5 Experience

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/25/140

With the 153rd Open Championship unfolding just up the Antrim coast at Royal Portrush, Belfast Whiskey Week 2025 took the opportunity to have a little sport of its own. Par 5: Choose Your Woods Wisely was a festival-exclusive tasting experience held at the brilliant Liquor XXX on Ventry Street, inviting guests to step away from the fairways and into something altogether more rewarding — five drams drawn from five distinct wooden casks, each one a different club in the bag.

About This Event

With the 153rd Open at Royal Port Rush taking place this weekend, we thought we’d have a little bit of fun with some of our Whiskey Tastings. Keep an eye out for these very special tastings that bring you championship style whiskey experiences.

Par 5: Choose Your Woods Wisely is a fantastic opportunity for you to taste whiskies that are using different wood types to finish and mature. This tasting is solely unique to the festival, and will be held in the famous Liquor XXX on Ventry Street, just off Dublin Rd.

5 drams from 5 different wooden casks.

Looking Back

There's a particular kind of pleasure in a tasting built around a single variable. Strip away the distillery rivalries, the regional allegiances, the vintage debates, and what you're left with is wood — that ancient, generous material that transforms raw spirit into something worthy of the name uisce beatha. That was precisely the proposition at Par 5, and it was one that landed with quiet authority on a Sunday afternoon at 3pm, the city buzzing with Open weekend energy and Liquor XXX doing what it does best: making premium spirits feel genuinely accessible.

The venue itself suited the occasion down to the ground. Liquor XXX is a bar that takes its spirits seriously without taking itself too seriously — a fine quality in a host. Tucked just off Dublin Road on Ventry Street, it provided an intimate and unhurried setting for a tasting that rewarded attention. Five drams arrived in sequence, each drawn from a different cask type: the kind of lineup that invites comparison, conversation, and the occasional moment of genuine surprise. Whether the wood in question was virgin oak, ex-sherry, port pipe, red wine or something altogether more unexpected, each expression carried its own character — its own dúchas, if you will — shaped by the vessel that had held it.

What made Par 5 genuinely special was its exclusivity to the festival. This wasn't a brand roadshow or a distillery showcase lifted from a standard tour itinerary. It was conceived specifically for Belfast Whiskey Week 2025, designed to sit alongside The Open Championship in spirit and in theme. The golf metaphor held up well: choosing your wood wisely is as true at the cask as it is on the tee box, and guests who came in curious left with a far sharper sense of just how profoundly maturation vessel shapes the whiskey in the glass. For those who wanted to explore the city's broader whiskey landscape around the festival, the Belfast Whiskey Map offered a fine companion guide.

The afternoon slotted neatly into what was a rich programme of experience-led events across the week. While Par 5 leaned into the contemplative — five drams, five casks, time to think — other events in the 2025 lineup took a more hands-on approach. The Cocktail Making session with Titanic Whiskey and Angel & 2 Bibles brought craft and creativity together in equal measure, while the Cocktails & Perception Masterclass pushed the boundaries of how we engage with flavour entirely. Between them, these events captured the breadth of what Belfast Whiskey Week continues to do so well: meet whiskey lovers where they are and take them somewhere new.

Sláinte to everyone who pulled up a stool at Liquor XXX that Sunday afternoon. Par 5 was, by any measure, well under par — and the woods were chosen very wisely indeed.