The Springbok Shot, and Its Better-Known Cousin the Springbokkie

We came to this one through a reader in Cape Town who wanted to know why hers kept going grainy, and the answer turned out to be interesting enough to write up properly.

The Springbok is a two-layer shooter in green and cream, named for the national rugby side and, by extension, the antelope on the jersey. It gets poured at braais and rugby clubs and roughly every South African bar from November through March.

There are two versions. The difference between them is not cosmetic.

The two builds

Springbok — crème de menthe, Irish cream.

Springbokkie — peppermint liqueur, Amarula.

Both are poured green first, cream second, in a straight-sided shot glass, roughly two parts green to one part cream. Both look identical in the glass. They taste noticeably different, and one of them behaves much better on a warm evening.

The layering

Crème de menthe carries a heavy sugar load and sits at around 1.12 g/ml, which puts it comfortably beneath both cream liqueurs. That gives you a wide density margin, so this is a forgiving layer — you do not need a steady hand to get a clean line.

Pour the green first and let it settle. Then float the cream slowly over the back of a bar spoon held just above the surface. The spoon is doing one thing only: spreading the incoming liquid wide and dropping its velocity, so it arrives gently rather than punching through.

Cold glassware helps more here than most people expect. Chilled liqueurs are denser and more viscous, and a shooter built from bottles straight out of the fridge holds its line for a good ten minutes instead of blurring in two.

Why one curdles

This is the part that answers our reader’s question.

Peppermint liqueur and crème de menthe are both fairly neutral in acidity, so neither of them will break a dairy liqueur on contact. The trouble comes from what people substitute when they cannot find one — usually peppermint schnapps, which in some brands carries citric acid, and that is more than enough to curdle Irish cream on the way down the glass.

Amarula, the base of the Springbokkie, is a marula-fruit cream liqueur and is slightly more robust than Irish cream against a mild acid knock, but it is not immune. Neither is a candidate for pre-batching. Pour these to order, hand them over, and do not build a tray twenty minutes ahead of the toast.

If yours has already gone grainy, it will not come back. Start again with a different mint bottle.

What to serve it with

It reads as a dessert shot to most palates outside South Africa, and it sits nicely at the end of a meal alongside the rest of that family — our dessert shots collection has a dozen in the same register. If it is the Irish cream bottle that brought you here rather than the occasion, the Baileys shooter guide is the fuller list.

And since a bottle of crème de menthe tends to sit untouched for months after one of these, it is worth checking what else it will build before it goes back in the cupboard.

Last modified on September 6, 2026