The Goombay Smash is credited to Emily Cooper — known island-wide as "Miss Emily" — who served it at her Blue Bee Bar on Green Turtle Cay in the Bahamas from the 1950s or 60s onward. She kept the exact recipe a closely guarded secret for decades, and by most accounts took the precise proportions with her rather than publishing them, which means every recipe in circulation today, including this one, is a reconstruction rather than the original formula.
Miss Emily never wrote it down, and nobody who tried to reverse-engineer it agrees on the ratios.
A Secret Kept for Decades
Green Turtle Cay is a small island in the Bahamas' Abacos chain, and the Blue Bee Bar became a destination almost entirely on the strength of Miss Emily's drink. She reportedly served it without ever revealing the exact recipe, and visitors and cocktail writers have spent decades publishing competing guesses — coconut rum and apricot brandy show up in nearly all of them, but the ratios and the third or fourth ingredient vary from source to source.
This build follows the version of the reconstruction most consistently repeated across tiki-revival recipe collections: it is a reasonable approximation, not a restoration.
The Spec
Coconut rum and dark rum form the base, apricot brandy adds the drink's characteristic orange-gold fruitiness, and equal parts orange and pineapple juice round it into a blended cooler.
Apricot brandy is the tell
Most competing Goombay Smash recipes agree that some form of apricot liqueur is in the mix — it's what gives the drink its orange-gold cast and a fruitiness that plain rum and juice wouldn't produce on their own.
Blended over shaken
The traditional serve is blended with ice to a smooth, slushy consistency, in keeping with its role as a hot-day beach-bar drink rather than a sipping cocktail.
Bottom Line
There's no honest way to serve "the real" Goombay Smash — Miss Emily made sure of that — but this reconstruction captures the coconut-and-apricot profile that made her bar a destination.