Irish car bomb (cocktail)
American beer cocktail
An Irish car bomb, Irish slammer, Irish bomb shot, or Dublin drop is a cocktail, similar to a boilermaker, made by dropping a bomb shot of Irish cream and Irish whiskey into a glass of Irish stout.
History
The cocktail was invented in the US in 1979 in Wilson's Saloon in Norwich, Connecticut by Charles Burke Cronin Oat. He had originally created a mixed shot drink called a Grandfather combining Baileys Irish Cream and Kahlúa. On 17 March 1977 (Saint Patrick's Day), he added Jameson Irish Whiskey to the drink, calling this drink "the IRA." In 1979, Oat spontaneously dropped this shot into a partially-drunk Guinness, calling the result a Belfast Carbomb or Irish Carbomb.
Name
The "Irish" in the name refers to the drink's Irish ingredients; typically Guinness stout, Baileys Irish Cream, and Jameson Irish Whiskey. The term "car bomb" combines reference to its "bomb shot" style, as well as the noted car bombings of Northern Ireland's Troubles.
The name is considered by many to be offensive, with many bartenders refusing to serve it. Some people, including Irish comedians, have likened it to ordering an "Isis" or "Twin Towers" in an American bar and warned that ordering one is the "quickest way to get thrown out of a pub (or get a black eye) in Ireland".
In 2014, The Junction nightclub in Oxford included the drink in promotional material for St. Patrick's Day.
“Irish car bomb (cocktail)” enters the record as american beer cocktail. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Irish, bomb and cocktail can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1128444. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1979, 1977 and 2014.
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This entry incorporates text from “Irish car bomb (cocktail)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.