The Murky Origins Of The Sex On The Beach Cocktail

It's bright, it's fruity, and it's the third most famous cultural export from "Cocktail" behind Tom Cruise and "Kokomo" – it's the Sex on the Beach! Although mixology has grown ever more sophisticated since the cocktail's halcyon days of the '80s, there should still be a place in our hearts for drinks like these, no matter how dated or tacky they may seem. 

When you're on vacation in Florida and you're sitting at a bar whose decor hasn't been updated since the first Bush administration, you're not looking for some fussy concoction made from craft whisky, gourmet coffee, and a single tear from a virgin unicorn. You're looking for something that hits.

The name helps, of course. If it were called a Schnapps Sunrise or a Daytona Toodle-oo or whatever, it wouldn't have been nearly as popular — Sex on the Beach lends the drink a certain cheeky abandon, a very '80s sort of naughtiness that's silly and enticing at the same time. It's certainly much more pleasant than actual sex on the beach, which is, by most accounts, kind of a nightmare. But where did the drink come from, and why does it have such a striking name?

There's nothing people love more than a food or drink with a neat origin story, and Sex on the Beach seems like it has a good one — if somewhat more mercenary than the (alleged) origins of chocolate chip cookies or Nashville hot chicken. The story goes that a Floridian bartender by the name of Ted Pizio took up a $1000 challenge in 1987 to sell as much peach schnapps as he could, so he created a cocktail based around it. As for the name, he was inspired by the influx of tourists coming to town on Spring Break. What were they looking for? Well, they wanted sex, and they wanted the beach — and from there, it was easy to put two and two together.

It's a quintessentially American story of ambition, canny marketing, and drunk college students. But like most fanciful food origin stories, this one appears to be ... false: Sex on the Beach showed up in a cocktail recipe book in 1982, five years before Ted Pizio was supposedly inspired to sell a ton of peach schnapps. And "Cocktail," the movie that helped make the drink so emblematic of its decade, only came out in 1988 — if the Pizio story were true, the drink would have to have caught on remarkably quickly.

So who invented the Sex on the Beach? It's hard to give a definite answer — but maybe we don't have to. Maybe it was invented by an enterprising bartender looking to sell some peach schnapps, maybe it was designed in a lab by proto-mixologist eggheads. So much of food history is shrouded in myths and falsehoods, and while that can certainly be frustrating, the myths can still be woven into a compelling tapestry. Even something as tacky as a Sex on the Beach can have history and intrigue behind it.

The saying goes that "when legend becomes fact, print the legend", and while "legend" might be a bit of a lofty word to use for such a frivolous cocktail, the origin story undeniably adds color and character to cocktail history. Besides, even if it wasn't literally invented to make money off of drunk, horny college students in Florida, it didn't take long for it to become that.