Koko Kanu 70 cl, 37.5% ABV - Jamaica Coconut Rum

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Richard Godwin, meanwhile, gives two piña colada recipes in his new book The Spirits, one using light rum and one using a mixture of dark and coconut rum (“the proper stuff, like Koko Kanu, not Malibu”).

The piña colada: naff or not – and even if you are a fan, is it one of those drinks that’s strictly reserved for holidays? Stir the coconut milk to make sure it hasn’t separated into water and cream, then add to the ice along with the rum and pineapple juice. Even the great mixologist Tony Conigliaro names it as his guilty pleasure – as if this totally tropical taste were something to be ashamed of.That said, Conigliaro’s recipe falls at the first hurdle in using cachaça instead of rum, which disqualifies it from the classic colada race. Using enough ice to fill your glass to two-thirds, whizz in a blender until crushed, or place the ice in a clean tea towel and whack repeatedly with a rolling pin, rounders bat or similar, then put in a cocktail shaker. Victoria Moore hits the nail on the head in her book How to Drink: “At some point around the 1980s … piña colada stopped being a drink and became an excruciating razzmatazz of an event guaranteed to arrive at your table like a carnival float, in an obscenely large glass, decked with thrillingly garish paraphernalia such as a fuchsia paper parasol or six. In any case, it seems a shame to use a mild-flavoured light rum – it has no chance against coconut and pineapple – but the dark one in DeGroff’s recipe feels too heavy for a drink that is crying out to be sipped on a sunlounger, so I’m going to use golden rum.

I love the fact that it is so adaptable, have it with pineapple juice or just with some ice and cinnamon on its own!

Fellow bartender Dale DeGroff says the trick to making a great piña colada is to use both light and dark rum, Moore goes for the golden kind, telling readers to use “a richer, more aged rum if you like the sunny flavour to show through”, or “a white rum if you prefer the coconut and pineapple to dominate” – which is exactly what Larousse Cocktails, Food52 and Jason Wilson of the Washington Post opt for.

I like it with lime juice, ice and a bit of sugar with a mint leaf on top for a lovely refreshing drink. The cream of coconut is unpleasantly gloopy, while the coconut water is too subtle – it works in Godwin’s second version, because it’s a much shorter drink, but I can hardly taste it in Wilson’s drink.There are two types of people in this world: those who admit to liking piña colada, and pretentious idiots. Just as I’m wondering how many different rums it’s decent for one woman to have in her collection, I spot that he has helpfully included instructions on how to make your own coconut rum by fat-washing light rum with coconut oil, which provides surprisingly easy and effective, though it’s a subtlety that would be lost in the classic recipe using coconut milk rather than coconut water. It is fabulous for an elderly lady drinker like myself LOL ' I totally recommend - it tastes a bit like rum Chata .