Drinks for Every Taste: Sweet, Salty, Sour, Bitter, and Umami

Let the five fundamental tastes (sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami) guide you behind the home bar with over 70 recipes for well-balanced cocktails and elevated bar bites.

The best cocktails start with understanding flavor and how it works for you. Recipe developer and content creator, Evie Negri-Albert (known online as drinksbyevie), is here to help you use the five tastes as a framework for learning how ingredients interact, how balance is built, and how intentional technique can reshape the way you approach drink-making at home.

In Drinks for Every Taste, the bar becomes a flavor playground. Where charred corn syrup and a dollop of store-bought mayo find their way into the same drink, while sugar snap peas and fresh oregano are blitzed into a sweet green juice for a refreshing gin-based cocktail. Through a wide range of ingredients and approachable techniques rooted in play, you’ll discover new ways to think about flavor—and find as much joy in the process as you do in the finished drink.

At the heart of this playful experimentation are the five tastes: sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami. Each chapter focuses on one taste, guiding you through the science, techniques, and key ingredients that create that taste with recipes to put that knowledge into practice:

• Transform childhood nostalgia into a clarified milk punch in Crunchatized, where cereal is used to make both a syrup and cereal milk before being clarified into a crystal clear, rum-based cocktail
• Reimagine salt as a tool, not just an ingredient in Tableside, where roasted garlic-infused vermouth and Parmesan combine to create a Caesar-salad inspired martini
• Explore acid-adjusting in Short Circuit, where pear juice is whisked together with citric and malic acid, shifting from purely sweet to something that truly wakes up the palate

• Learn how to wield bitter notes in Goblin Mode by infusing shochu with bitter melon tea before shaking it up with some basil syrup and lime juice

• Discover umami through fat-washing in Hog Wild, where bacon fat brings a smoky, savory depth to bourbon

These techniques (and many more) transform and balance ingredients, showing you the powerful tools at your fingertips for creating a well-rounded cocktail. The last chapter includes a few bar bites designed for thoughtful entertaining.  

With 65 delightfully full-flavored cocktails and a variety of bar bites made for playful exploration, Drinks for Every Taste invites you to follow your intuitive curiosity and craft expressive, balanced drinks guided by taste.