Peach Fizz

Peach schnapps shaken with lime and lengthened with soda water — the Fizz format balances the liqueur's sweetness into something light, bubbly, and refreshing.

The Peach Fizz is a simple, refreshing long drink built on peach schnapps — the sweetened peach-flavored liqueur whose American commercial launch in 1984 transformed the domestic bar landscape. DeKuyper Peachtree Schnapps, introduced by the John DeKuyper & Son company (now part of Beam Suntory) in 1984, was the first commercially successful mass-market peach schnapps in the United States, creating a new category of sweet, fruit-flavored liqueurs whose accessibility to casual drinkers drove enormous sales growth through the 1980s. The Fizz format — liqueur or spirit, citrus, and soda water — is one of the oldest documented cocktail categories in American bartending, appearing in Jerry Thomas's 1862 Bar-Tenders Guide as a standard preparation applicable to any base spirit or liqueur. Applied to peach schnapps, the Fizz's citrus-and-carbonation structure provides exactly the structural balance that the liqueur's sweetness alone lacks: the acid of lime or lemon juice and the effervescence of soda water cut through the schnapps's thick sweetness, producing a more refreshing drink than the neat liqueur or the peach schnapps combined simply with orange juice (as in the Fuzzy Navel) achieves. The Peach Fizz became a natural warm-weather bar offering following Peachtree's commercial success.