Buttery Nipple

Butterscotch schnapps and Irish cream — the 1980s taboo-humor shot where provocative naming drove orders, DeKuyper's 1993 Buttershots enabling the category.

The Buttery Nipple is a dessert shot that layers butterscotch schnapps with Irish cream — most commonly Baileys Original Irish Cream — to produce a golden-and-cream layered presentation whose flavor is as approachable as its name is provocative. The drink belongs to a category of suggestively named novelty shots that became commercially fashionable in American bar culture from the mid-1980s onward, when the Slippery Nipple (Sambuca and Baileys), the Blow Job (Baileys and whipped cream), and the Buttery Nipple appeared on casual bar menus as taboo-humor marketing vehicles. Despite the name's deliberate shock value, the flavor combination is genuinely pleasant: butterscotch's caramelized sugar and butter aromatics complement Baileys Irish Cream's whiskey-and-dairy richness in a two-ingredient pairing that requires no technique beyond careful layering (pouring the Irish cream over the back of a spoon onto the surface of the schnapps to maintain visual separation). Butterscotch schnapps became widely available in American bars following DeKuyper's 1993 Buttershots launch, and the Buttery Nipple's commercial spread accelerated alongside the butterscotch schnapps category's growth through the mid-1990s. The drink has no fixed inventor or establishment of record; it emerged from the commercial bar culture's adoption of the new ingredient.