Fuzzy Navel Recipe

The Fuzzy Navel has a silly name and a simple recipe with only two required ingredients.

And, yet, it’s popular with a plethora of people who drink the peachy cocktail with glee. To many of those people, who are generally under 25 years old and of the female persuasion, this drink serves as a cocktail gateway to a road that eventually leads to martinis.

While the original Fuzzy Navel recipe included orange juice and peach schnapps in a 1:1 ratio, not every mixologist follows that same formula today.

Some double or triple the amount of orange juice while others add vodka to the mix. However, to be clear, adding vodka transforms the Fuzzy Navel into a Hairy Navel.

Fun Fact
You may be wondering about the Fuzzy’s Navel suggestive, belly button inspired name. To those who really haven’t figured it out yet, the word fuzzy refers to peach fuzz while the word navel describes a type of orange.

The Fuzzy Navel seems like one of those cocktails that appeared out of nowhere. Au contraire. The drink’s history is the opposite of fuzzy.

Bartender Ray Foley claims credit for its invention in the 1980s. That timing not coincidentally coincides with the introduction of DeKuyper Peachtree Schnapps to the US market in 1984. Within a few years, DeKuyper’s peach liqueur was a top seller. That status later changed when more sophisticated sippers, like the Gimlet and Negroni, became the rage.

You don’t need a lot of ingredients to craft a Fuzzy Navel at home. We use the following items in our recipe:

You don’t need fancy equipment to craft a Fuzzy Navel. We use the following basic bar tools to craft ours:

Don’t worry if you’re missing one or both of these tools. You can use a regular spoon or straw instead of a bar spoon. You can also use a small angled measuring cup instead of a jigger.

Discover essential 10 essential bar tools for home mixologists.

The first step in our recipe is to juice an orange. We use a citrus juicer for this step.

Pro Tip
Your Fuzzy Navel will still taste good if you use store-bought orange juice but it will taste a lot better with the freshly squeezed stuff.

Partially fill a highball glass with ice. You can use any ice cubes for this step.

Measure the orange juice and pour it into the ice-filled glass. For this step, we use a Japanese jigger to achieve both accuracy and efficiency.

Buy a Japanese jigger from Amazon if you need a jigger or desire an inexpensive upgrade.

There are a multitude of Fuzzy Navel alternatives, many with names that make us blush. Here are a few options you may want to try: