What Is Peach Schnapps? Peachtree, Leroux and What to Mix

Peach schnapps is a sweet, low-proof peach liqueur, usually 15 to 20 percent alcohol, made by flavouring a clean neutral spirit with peach and sweetening it. It is not distilled from peaches, it is not a brandy, and it is not meant to be sipped. It is a mixing bottle, and it is the reason a Fuzzy Navel tastes like anything at all.

It is also one of the cheapest useful bottles in a liquor store. We sell two, both a full litre, both under fifteen dollars.

The two peach bottles on our shelf

DeKuyper Peachtree Schnapps, 1L, $12.99. This is the famous one. Peachtree launched in 1984, sold absurdly well, and taught a generation what peach schnapps tastes like. Ripe yellow peach, a little peach skin, a clean base and a slightly syrupy weight. It carries OU certification from the 2008 Beam line-wide approval.

Leroux Peach Schnapps, 1L, $14.99. Softer and a touch more apricot than Peachtree: ripe peach and dried orchard fruit, honeyed rather than candied, with a shorter finish. If you are building brunch drinks where the peach should sit underneath the orange juice rather than on top of it, this is the one.

Two dollars apart, and honestly you will not lose a night's sleep over the difference. Buy Peachtree if you want the flavour people expect. Buy Leroux if you want it a shade less sweet.

What do you actually make with it?

Four drinks cover almost everything peach schnapps is bought for, and none of them need a bar tool more complicated than a spoon.

• Fuzzy Navel. Peach schnapps and orange juice over ice, roughly one to three. That is the whole recipe. It is a two-ingredient drink and it is the single most common reason a bottle of this leaves the shop.
• Sex on the Beach. Vodka, peach schnapps, orange juice, a splash of cranberry poured last so it sinks. Same idea with a spirit backbone.
• Woo Woo. Vodka, peach schnapps, cranberry. Sharper than the above, and it looks better than it has any right to.
• Peach Bellini. A short pour of schnapps in the bottom of a flute, topped with something sparkling. A shortcut around puréeing white peaches, which nobody is doing on a Friday afternoon.

Three of those four want vodka or sparkling wine alongside. If you are stocking from scratch, a litre of schnapps and a bottle from our kosher vodka shelf covers the whole list.

Peach schnapps versus real schnapps

Worth knowing, because the word does two different jobs. In Germany and Austria, Schnaps means a dry fruit brandy: distilled from the fruit itself, no sugar, often 40 percent, and drunk cold in a small glass after a heavy meal. Nothing sweet about it.

What Americans call schnapps is a different animal: neutral spirit, flavouring, sugar, bottled around 15 to 20 percent. Peachtree and Leroux are both firmly in the American camp. If you have been told schnapps is a serious after-dinner spirit and then tasted a Fuzzy Navel, that is the gap you fell into.

The rest of the flavour rack

Peach is the volume seller, but it is not the only one. DeKuyper Peppermint Schnapps, 1L, $14.99 runs 60 proof, considerably stronger than the peach, and is the bottle behind candy cane shots and spiked hot cocoa. It is a winter purchase in a way peach never is.

Past that, the sweet-liqueur shelf gets wide quickly. Our Liqueur & Schnapps collection runs to around ninety bottles. If you came here for peach and left curious, amaretto and cherry liqueur are the two most useful neighbours.

How long does it keep?

A long time. Sugar and alcohol are both preservatives, and at 15 to 20 percent an opened bottle of peach schnapps will sit in a cupboard for a year or more without going off. It will slowly lose the brightness at the top of the peach flavour, so a bottle three years open makes a duller Fuzzy Navel than a fresh one, but it will not spoil. No need to refrigerate it, though a cold pour makes a better drink.

One practical note: a litre is a lot of schnapps if you are making four drinks a year. Buy it when you have a reason (a brunch, a kiddush, a summer of Fuzzy Navels) rather than as a shelf-filler.

Is it strong?

No, and this trips people up. At 15 to 20 percent, peach schnapps is roughly wine strength, not spirit strength. A Fuzzy Navel made with schnapps and juice alone is a genuinely light drink. It is the Sex on the Beach and the Woo Woo that hit harder, and that is the vodka doing it, not the peach.

The flip side: because it tastes like peach candy, it goes down fast. Sweet and low-proof is a combination worth respecting.

Mixers, while you are here

Peach schnapps almost never gets poured on its own, which means whatever you mix it with matters as much as the bottle. We wrote up the rest of the mixer shelf recently: grenadine, simple syrup, sour mix and the rest, all under nine dollars. A Woo Woo with decent cranberry and a Woo Woo with the cheap stuff are two different drinks.

We ship anywhere in the country. Both peach bottles and the peppermint are on the shelf now.