Woo Woo

Orange juice. Sex on the Beach carries both cranberry and orange, which softens the tartness and turns it into fruit punch. Without it you get a cleaner, sharper drink where the peach reads clearly instead of being buried. Same vodka, same schnapps, different shape.

Ordinary cranberry juice cocktail is what this drink was built on, and it's already sweetened. Pure unsweetened cranberry is far more astringent and will strip the glass bare, though it makes a much better drink if you then cut the schnapps to 20 ml. Read the sugar line on the carton.

The ratio tightens. As a shooter it goes roughly equal parts vodka, peach schnapps and cranberry, chilled hard and poured into a small glass, so it lands sweet and cold rather than long and refreshing. The tall version here is the one you can actually sit with.

Check what's actually in the carton. A lot of supermarket cranberry is mostly apple or grape juice with a little cranberry for flavor, and it dilutes to a washed-out pink. Juice with a higher cranberry content holds a deep red even after ice melts into it.

Squeeze it. Cranberry gives you astringency but very little actual acid, and peach schnapps supplies none at all, so without the lime the drink sits heavy on the tongue. A hard squeeze from a full wedge is enough to pull the whole glass back into line.

A classic Woo Woo calls for 30 ml (1 oz) Vodka, 30 ml (1 oz) Peach schnapps, 90 ml (3 oz) Cranberry juice. That single-serve spec scales cleanly — the recipe above converts it to oz and multiplies it for 2–4 drinks.

A standard Woo Woo is roughly 12% ABV once mixed (before ice melt softens it further). That makes it about as strong as a glass of wine.