World Whiskies Session 2 – Global 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/25/516

When the clock nudged past nine on a July Sunday at the Deer's Head Music Hall, something quietly radical was happening in one of Belfast's most storied rooms. World Whiskies: Session 2 — the fortieth event of Belfast Whiskey Week 2025 — gathered a room full of curious drinkers and pointed them deliberately away from the familiar: no Bushmills, no Glenfiddich, no Jameson. Just uisce beatha from the corners of the world most of us had never thought to look.

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 certain comfort in the known. Irish and Scotch are our duchas — our inheritance, our default reach on a dark evening. And there is nothing wrong with that. But Belfast Whiskey Week has always believed that the festival's duty is not only to celebrate what we know and love, but to gently, generously pull the map wider. Session 2 of the World Whiskies tasting did exactly that, following on from the success of World Whiskies: Session 1 earlier in the week, and arriving at the Deer's Head with an atmosphere already warm and the audience already adventurous.

The Deer's Head on Lower Garfield Street is the kind of venue that carries its own seanchas. One of Belfast's oldest surviving music halls, it holds the city's stories in its walls — and on this particular evening, those walls witnessed a genuinely global spread of spirits that few rooms in Ireland could claim to have hosted. The tasting was, by design, delightfully unpredictable. The word 'random' in the event description was not a marketing flourish — the selection genuinely reached into territories most attendees had never tasted: French single malt, Brazilian sugarcane-adjacent grain whiskey, Icelandic expressions born from volcanic water and arctic barley. Each dram arrived with its own geography, its own climate, its own argument for why whiskey need not stop at the sheugh.

What made the evening work was the honesty of the format. Nobody in the room was pretending these were everyday pours. Some expressions were revelatory — clean, precise, unlike anything produced on these islands. Others were challenging in ways that sparked genuine conversation rather than polished approval. That's the best kind of whiskey evening: not a masterclass where you absorb received wisdom, but a shared exploration where the room itself becomes the authority. For those who had already joined us for the Tasmanian Whiskies: Session 1 or were planning to take in Tasmanian Whiskies: Session 2, this session sat beautifully in the festival's broader argument — that exceptional whiskey is now made on every inhabited continent, and that the world's distillers are speaking to one another across oceans.

At £30, this was one of the festival's most quietly ambitious offerings. Not because of any single bottle's rarity or price point, but because of the intellectual generosity behind the curation — the willingness to say: here is something we cannot fully predict, and that is the point. Slàinte to everyone who came with an open glass and an open mind. The whiskey map of the world is larger than most of us have yet explored — and if you want to begin that journey properly, our Whiskey Map is a fine place to start.