Water Moccasin Shot

Crown Royal, peach schnapps, and sour mix — named for the southeastern US cottonmouth, the tradition of giving sweet drinks the most threatening names available.

The Water Moccasin Shot is an American party shooter combining Crown Royal Canadian whisky with peach schnapps and sour mix — a sweet, peachy, approachable combination that belies its venomous-snake name. The water moccasin (Agkistrodon piscivorus), also called cottonmouth, is a semiaquatic pit viper native to the southeastern United States, found in swamps, marshes, and slow-moving waterways from Virginia to Texas. It is one of the few semiaquatic venomous snakes in North America and is known for its aggressive defensive posture — opening its mouth to display the white interior (the cotton of the cottonmouth name) when threatened. The shot's threatening name follows the American bar tradition of naming approachable, sweet drinks after fearsome things — producing the same humor of mismatch as the Buttery Nipple, the Snake Bite, and other provocatively named preparations whose flavor bears no relationship to their nomenclature. Crown Royal's smooth character and peach schnapps's sweetness produce a genuinely pleasant result.