Fuzzy Navel

Peach schnapps and orange juice — Ray Foley's 1984 DeKuyper Peachtree Schnapps launch creation, one of America's best-selling cocktails through the late 1980s.

The Fuzzy Navel was created in 1984 by Ray Foley, a New Jersey-based bartender and cocktail writer who would later found Bartender Magazine, at the same time that DeKuyper Peachtree Schnapps was being introduced to the American market. Foley's combination of the new peach schnapps with fresh orange juice at a spirits industry trade show produced a drink that demonstrated the commercial potential of the category instantly — the peach's sweetness and orange's acidity complemented each other in a way that required no bartending skill, making the result accessible to home drinkers as well as bar consumers. The drink's name is a wordplay: fuzzy references the soft fuzz on a peach's skin, while navel references the navel orange variety whose juice is most commonly used, combining both fruits' colloquial identifiers in a single mildly suggestive phrase. The Fuzzy Navel became one of the best-selling cocktails in the United States through the late 1980s, helping establish the flavored schnapps category as one of the most commercially significant developments in American bar culture of the decade. DeKuyper Peachtree Schnapps remained one of the best-selling liqueurs in the United States for years following the Fuzzy Navel's success.