I've known Norwich to be proud of lots of things over the years and embrace much of its culture and history, from its lovely roses to the early visit to the city by Abraham Lincoln.

Until recently, though, after some fresh criticism got stirred up Ireland, I never realized that Norwich is also widely known in many official drinking circles as the home of the Irish Car Bomb.

The bomb, which combines a whiskey-laden shot and a lot of Guinness beer, even has its own Web site, irishcarbomb.com.

The site, along with many others, cites Charles Oat, owner of the Connecticut School of Bartending on Franklin Street in Norwich, as the creator of the drink.

Oat was also specifically cited in a recent story in the Sunday Tribune of Dublin, which quoted a spokesman for a group representing victims of IRA violence.

The story, which mentions a neon sign in Las Vegas advertising the drink - usually a shot of Baileys and Jameson Irish Whiskey in Guinness - got a lot of international circulation.

"It is disgusting that IRA car bombs, which killed and maimed so many in Northern Ireland, are being trivialised or celebrated in this way," the spokesman for IRA victims was quoted as saying. "I would have expected Americans, of all people, to behave more sensitively and responsibly.

"How would they like it if we developed the Al-Quaeda car bomb, the Twin Towers cocktail or the 9/11 ice cream sundae?"

After reading the story in the Tribune, I searched and also saw a story with a headline from Ireland: "Irish Car Bomb inventor apologises."

After tracking Oat down in Norwich this week, though, I can report he hardly seems ready to apologize to anyone.

Instead, he strikes me as a proud father, happy, for whatever reason, his baby is making world headlines again.

Oat told me the original story was based only on the rantings of one person, who, he added, seems to be "years late" if he wanted to complain.

"I am not apologizing in the sense that they think," Oat told me, when I mentioned the "inventor apologises" headline from Ireland.

"Some people choose to make things negative," he said. "I can't stop bars and drinkers. The drink is what it is."

I won't spend a lot of time here describing how to make a car bomb, because you can find various recipes all over the web. The principal ingredients, though, seem to be the whiskey-laden shot dropped into the Guinness, causing all kinds of frothy and watery tumult.

"If your date is ugly, this will definitely make him look better," one especially chesty barkeep suggests, after mixing a car bomb in a video on a site that features lots of car bomb recipes.

Oat recalled that he and his brother invented the shot that he prefers goes into the car bomb - Baileys and Kahlua - in the late 1970s, in the saloon he owned at Franklin Street at the time. The bar, once named Wilson's, was in the same building Oat now leases to a place called Chacer's Bar & Grill.

"We were just drinking shots and toasting our grandfathers," Oat recalled, saying he and his brother called the first shots IRAs. It was St. Patrick's Day at the time.

A few years later the shots, this time with whiskey, were dropped in the Guinness, and "bombs away," Oat recalls saying at the Franklin Street bar.

"The next thing you know it is the Irish Car Bomb, although at first it was the Belfast Car Bomb," Oat said.

The drink may have gained traction fast, Oat surmises, because of the large number of military customers around Norwich who then moved around the world. Also, both Guinness and Jameson's Irish Whiskey soon started marketing campaigns in this country.

One thing almost every recipe I found suggests is that you drink the car bomb right away. A few suggest it will quickly begin to curdle, almost like cheese.

And even Oat suggests bartenders sometimes don't like to make them, because they're messy.

This is the opinion of David Collins.