Has all of this wintry weather tempted you to book a ticket to the tropics?

Good luck finding a good drink there. For my Daily Beast  column this week, I wrote about why beach resort cocktails suck and how we can make them brilliant.Check out the piece for the answer, which includes tiki historical context and a few contemporary places doing mixed drinks right. In the meantime, let me give you the best advice for avoiding headaches caused by sugary Mai Tais and fake red slushy daiquiris from personal experience: drink what the locals drink. It will be fresh, simple, and delicious. In the Caribbean, that usually means just putting coconut water and rum together. And as David Wondrich, cocktail historian and author of Imbibe  and Punch told me, that’s “the real drink of the tropics.”

I hadn’t been truly exposed to this until I got far off the beaten tourist track while making my own escape to the Bahamas with my husband Jay this New Year’s. Jay’s aunt Karen and uncle Ron live in the rural, southern part of Eleuthera, where they help run The Island School, a cool place for short-term visiting students to learn about marine conservation and biology, among other interesting real world pursuits. It’s over two hours from the most popular resorts on the island and a Bahama Mama (thank goodness!). The day we got in, Karen and Ron offered us “Sky Juice,” a Bahamian staple of fresh coconut water, sweetened condensed milk and rum (Bahamians also have an affinity for gin in it instead of rum, having been ruled by the British and all). It is traditionally topped with nutmeg, and reminiscent of a lighter eggnog as a result. When mixed, it is milky in color but definitely not thick like eggnog by any means. After Jay’s uncle Ron taught him how to do it, Jay got to work plucking coconuts off a tree literally right at Ron and Karen’s doorstep by the ocean. Carefully, he used a machete to slice the end of the coconut, leaving a hole to the center that makes pouring out the coconut water into a bowl or pitcher easier.

How to get fresh coconut water

Then you strain out any coconut fibers or meat that might have snuck through and add it to a cocktail tin with sweetened condensed milk and rum. If you’d prefer your Sky Juice a little sweeter or boozier, feel free to play with the proportions. Rather than topping my Sky Juice with nutmeg, I garnished it with a mint sprig, which added a nice aroma without feeling Christmasy:

Sky Juice is a simple mixture of coconut water, sweetened condensed milk and rum