Goombay Smash

The Bahamas' signature beach cocktail blending coconut rum with dark rum and tropical juices, the liquid soundtrack to island life.

The Goombay Smash was created by Miss Emily Cooper at her bar the Blue Bee in Green Turtle Cay, a small island community in the Abaco district of the Bahamas. Miss Emily became one of the most celebrated figures in Bahamian bar culture, operating her tiny establishment on a remote cay where the drink she invented made her internationally famous among the sailors, boaters, and travelers who discovered it. The drink takes its name from Goombay, the traditional Afro-Bahamian music style built around the goombay drum — a single-headed membranophone whose rhythms arrived in the Bahamas with enslaved West Africans and became the foundation of the islands' most characteristic musical form, performed at festivals, regattas, and communal celebrations throughout the archipelago. Miss Emily guarded her exact recipe closely throughout her life, and the versions that have circulated — typically combining coconut rum, dark rum, pineapple juice, and a tropical fruit element — are reconstructions rather than certified originals. After her death, her daughter Violet inherited both the bar and the task of continuing the recipe's tradition. The drink has since become widely associated with the Bahamas as a whole, appearing on menus at beach bars from Nassau to the Exumas, and the original Blue Bee bar in Green Turtle Cay remains a pilgrimage destination for anyone wanting to taste as close to the original as possible.