Something sharp reaches the front of the tongue and is gone almost at once. Something slower fills the middle. Something oily stays behind after you have swallowed. Every drink I like has all three, and the flat ones turn out to be stacked into a single column: three citrus notes with nothing underneath them, or three heavy late notes and no lift at the front.
So I put one note into each part and let the balance follow. The chart below is that idea drawn out. Each bar starts where a family of flavour arrives and ends where it gives up. Pick one and the drinks carrying it are marked the whole way down the page.
Twenty families of flavour, each one starting where it arrives in the mouth and ending where it fades. The left edge of a bar is sharp because arrival is sharp; the right edge is not, because nothing leaves all at once. Click a bar to mark the drinks that carry it.
What follows is the seventeen drinks I think are worth writing down: the ones I built, the ones that have been through my kitchen often enough to count as mine, and a few rare ones with their origins attached. Everything you can order in any bar in Europe sits at the bottom of the page as a list of numbers, which is all anyone needs from those.
Ordered from the drinks that live at the front of the tongue to the ones that sit at the back of it. The smear on the right is that drink traced onto the axis above.
These are on the page because somebody will ask you for one at some point, and the only useful thing to hand over is the numbers. Everything is in centilitres, which is how a Swede thinks about a drink. Learn the first six and you can work the rest out from them.