World Whiskies Session 1 | Straight Tasting | 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/25/532

On the evening of 19th July 2025, The Harrison played host to one of Belfast Whiskey Week's most adventurous sessions — a Straight Whiskey Tasting that threw the atlas wide open and dared its attendees to drink beyond their comfort zone. World Whiskies: Session 1 was exactly what its name promised: a deliberate, joyful departure from the familiar drams of Ireland and Scotland, casting its net across continents and climates that most whiskey lovers rarely visit in the glass.

About This Event

Let’s pick random whiskies form around the world and delve into some obscure flavours and tastes. The randomness of this tasting is defined by the fact most of us drink, Irish and Scottish Whiskey. Sometimes we dabble with Japanese, Australian and American, but how often do you reach for the French, Brazilian, or Icelandic whiskies?

This tasting will be an opportunity to try new whiskies, taste new flavours and explore countries that are not normally associated with whiskey production.

Looking Back

There's a quiet confidence in a room full of whiskey drinkers the moment they realise the bottle in front of them isn't Irish, isn't Scotch, and isn't Japanese. A brief pause. A raised eyebrow. Then curiosity takes over — and that was precisely the spirit (in every sense) that Session 1 of World Whiskies set out to nurture. The evening's premise was refreshingly honest: most of us reach for what we know. This tasting existed to gently challenge that habit.

The selection drew from corners of the whiskey world that rarely trouble the shelves of your local off-licence. French whiskey, with its wine-country terroir bleeding into the cask influence. Brazilian expressions carrying a warmth and sweetness shaped by the equatorial climate — where the angel's share is greedy and maturation moves fast. And then Icelandic whisky, born from water purer than almost anywhere on earth, with a clean minerality that feels almost elemental. Each pour arrived with a story worth telling, and the format of a Straight Whiskey Tasting gave the room the time and space to actually listen to those stories through the glass.

What made the evening particularly rewarding was the communal sense of discovery. Nobody in the room was an expert on all of these drams — and that was the point. The conversation flowed as freely as the whiskey, with attendees comparing notes across the table like travellers swapping tales from places they'd never been. A tasting like this doesn't ask you to have all the answers; it asks you to stay curious. For those who wanted to continue that curiosity across the week, World Whiskies: Session 2 offered a second leg of the same global journey, while Tasmanian Whiskies: Session 1 drilled deeper into one of the world's most exciting emerging whiskey regions.

The Harrison, as a venue, suited the mood well. There's an ease to the place — unpretentious, properly Belfast — that allowed the whiskies to do the talking without any sense of ceremony getting in the way. At £30 a head, Session 1 represented genuine value for the breadth of what was poured: this wasn't a tasting built around famous names and familiar flavour profiles, but around the kind of uisce beatha that rewards the open-minded drinker. The duchas of whiskey-making — that inherited craft and sense of place — was present in every glass, even if the tír in question was somewhere most attendees had never associated with distilling.

If you've ever wondered what lies beyond the well-trodden map of Irish, Scotch, and American — and you should wonder — events like this are the answer. Keep an eye on our Whiskey Map to trace the full geography of what Belfast Whiskey Week 2025 explored, and sláinte to everyone who turned up with an open mind and an empty glass.