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.