What makes a beverage taste good?

Over the past 2 months, we’ve received a little over half a dozen requests for formulating different beverages for various potential clients, mostly startups.

Those range from protein drinks, through isotonic beverages targeted at sportspeople and the gym crowd, down to your more everyday vitamins & minerals, tea & herb extracts products. Amazingly, although predictable in retrospect, all such inquiries had one key requirement in common: we’re asked for the most delicious drink possible.

As importantly, those requests are almost uniformly accompanied by a list of “Hard No’s”, that is the expectation is for a satisfying beverage, but one that is also healthy, functional, and makes away with controversial (if effective) ingredients.

The advance of clean label, functional alternatives to popular drinks, with a much more limited scope of allowable ingredients, begs an increasingly more important question: What makes a beverage taste good?

Opposites attract

The key to a great-tasting beverage is, a bit unintuitively, a combination of contrasting and sometimes opposite tastes.

In culinary science, other such, otherwise opposing flavors, combine to create superior taste than when used solitarily.

Salty & Sweet: Salted caramel, a favorite of mine, works because the salt intensifies sweetness, whilst balancing out sugar’s more cloying nature. The result is a more rounded flavor profile

Sweet & Spicy: BBQ sauce is beloved by millions because of its mix of sugars and spices. The sugar in it tempers the heat of the spices, while the spices add complexity and excitement to the sweetness.

Bitter & Sweet: Bittersweet Citrus cocktails, such as a grapefruit martini, work well because the sweetness offsets some of the bitterness, which in turn allows both profiles to emerge and create a more satisfying taste experience.

Sour & Salty: The reason people love Margaritas is because the salt from the salted rim of the glass (when made properly) enhances the brightness of the sour notes from the lime and orange liquor.

Umami & Sweet: Teriyaki sauce blends savory umami notes from the soy sauce with the sweetness of sugar or mirin, resulting in a rich and balanced profile.

Sour & Spicy: Hot and Sour soup is a staple in many Asian cuisines, making use of vinegars or citruses for sourness and chili peppers for heat. The acidity from the sour flavors brightens up the impact of the spicy heat, while the spice adds a layer of complexity that moderates the sour notes.

And finally, the go-to combo in soft drinks, Sweet & Sour.

To feel satisfying, you want your drink to be sweet, but also sour. It’s why quite literally 99.9% of drinks on the market feature both a sweetener and the likes of citric, malic, phosphoric or other weak acids. The sourness of the lemon juice in a Lemonade awakens the taste buds, while the sweetness rounds off the acidity, resulting in one of the simplest, most delicious drinks made by man.

Why do our taste buds like contradictions?

So why are these contrasting basic tastes so much more appealing to our tongue and mouth?

The traditional “Tongue map” way of thinking about how we perceive taste, which decreed that the five main basic tastes are essentially only registered at specific points, has been debunked. However, further inquiry has found that while all taste receptors in the tongue are capable of detecting all five basic tastes (sweet, sour, salty, bitter, umami), there is subtle difference in their density and sensitivity across the human tongue.

This is why the tip of the tongue usually registers sweetness a bit more acutely, while the sides or the back may be more attuned to sour and bitter compounds. This is important, as when you’re sipping on a drink, it doesn’t uniformly bathe your entire tongue all at once, but rather consequentially.

That, and other foundational observations in culinary science, combine to prescribe a sort of Go-To-Approach. You want to think about your drink as a sort of “taste adventure”.

And a rollercoaster ride, with its highs and lulls, makes for a more exciting journey than the humdrum of your daily commute to and from work. The same is true of a good beverage: its taste is comprised of peaks and valleys along the way. Action! is required.

On texture and aroma

Combining two basic tastes is not enough. Beverage texture is also important in improving mouthfeel.

It is why sugar is such an overwhelmingly important ingredient—it doesn’t just provide sweetness, but also texture. Increasing the viscosity of the drink even slightly works synergistically with the rest of the ingredients to positively underline their notes.

Importantly, such a viscosity increase can be quite minimal, as to be appropriate for even basic hydration. After all, when simply thirsty or working out, most people aren’t craving a thick, viscous beverage, but something lighter and more akin to water in consistency. Despite this, some added viscosity, when done elegantly, can elevate other tastes. In beverage formulations, this is usually achieved via gum compounds, pectin, others, or even by default due to the selection of functional ingredients. Proteins are an example of this.

Best of all? Clean label-friendly, natural options exist! Xanthan gum, for example, is made via a perfectly natural process of fermentation of simple sugars. This is no different than how humans have been making wine, beer, yogurt, cheese, sauerkraut, sourdough bread, vinegar, soy sauce, kombucha—in some cases for millennia!

Texture aside, beverage flavors are key. This is because flavor, let’s say Grapefruit, isn’t just about the taste that your tongue’s receptors pick up, but also because taste is a multi-sensory experience. Your nose plays a big part!

This is to say that although your tongue provides the fundamental taste profile, it isn’t working in isolation. The sensation of acidity (sourness) in grapefruit, for example, is an important part of its character, but only forms one piece of the puzzle. To solve, you have to factor in the volatile aromatic compounds given off by the grapefruit—limonene, nootkatone, citrus oils. They’re highly unstable and evaporate easily, making them detectable by the olfactory receptors in our noses.

The importance of flavor has been increasing as of late with demand for healthier, more functional drinks. This is because cleaner label formulations are diametrically opposed to high sugar contents and flavor modulating ingredients, leaving drinks with less to work with. In result, your flavor better be of high enough quality to be able to shoulder the extra weight it is now expected to carry. Flavors are not all made equal and are often among the hardest and most time-consuming to get right.

Synergistic effects

I already mentioned that essentially all beverages include weak acids in their ingredients list—citric, malic, orthophosphoric, tartaric, ascorbic, and sometimes a combinations of them. You may have also noticed that drinks often feature more than one sweetener, too.

Why?

As the title suggests, this is because in combination, both acids and sweeteners can be used at lower concentrations. Moreover, they cover for each other’s weaknesses and provide a superior, fuller taste profile.

For example, citric acid contributes a bright, immediate tang, while something like malic acid provides a smoother, more lingering tartness. In combination, the two temper each other and work together to offer a more robust sour taste with fewer, unpleasantly sharp notes.

Similarly, a blend of something like sugar and stevia, stevia and sucralose, stevia and monk fruit, work together to mask each other’s off-notes and offer a richer and fuller sweetness. Stevia is well-known for its somewhat metallic taste. In fact, all non-nutritive, high potency sweeteners have fairly problematic taste profiles.

Blending them together with another sweetener results in an improvement in final taste perception.

The role of color

Food coloring typically has no/indetectable taste. Yet science has demonstrated that it plays a key role in taste perception.

This is called Visual Priming. The color of the drink provides an immediate visual cue that sets up expectations about its taste. It’s why when we see a bright orange drink, we usually expect it to taste like… well, like an orange. And Colas have become so widely spread that dark caramel coloring usually primes consumers to expect a heavier drink with cola flavor or similar.

Apart from taste, coloring can prime the brain and dictate the expectations of sweetness, too. If your drink concept is a healthy hydration drink, for example, you may be better served by going for lighter, more natural hues and should probably avoid high intensity coloring.

Going rogue on what the human brain expects can be a costly mistake. If you’re going for strong color, but fail to provide commensurate sweetness and texture in your drink, empirical data suggests that your customers will perceive your drink as unsatisfactory—too washy, too light.

The reverse is also true, although to a somewhat smaller extent. If your drink is weakly colored, but features significant sweetness and texture, the instinctive conclusion is that something funky is going on.

Tying it all together

In conclusion, an intricate interplay of sensory elements, properly harmonized, create a truly dynamic taste experience. Flatness is the enemy—you want your beverage to feature high and low notes, ideally in quick succession. Our human bodies seem to truly like that, as unintuitive as it may sound at first. Both scientific theory and empirical data going back a millennia proves that.

By thoughtfully combining basic tastes (sweet, sour, salty, bitter, umami), making use of synergistic effects to modulate off-notes and undesirable aftertastes, and ensuring that texture, aroma, and coloring are on point, some drinks are set apart from others.

At AMATA, we’ve been expending a lot of energy lately to try and ensure that the drinks we formulate for clients are not simply satisfactory, but also carry an ingredients list that is suited for a modern audience. More and more consumers today are discerning and increasingly looking for a combination of great taste, functional benefits, and a clean label devoid of nasties.

This last part—Clean Label beverages and how they’re taking over the world—I leave for another day.

Chris

Hi. I'm Chris and I'm the Product Manager at our family-owned business, AMATA Ltd. Since 2016, I've been focused on expanding our Private Label presence. It took a while, but I've now helped more than a dozen international clients to manufacture their products—some of which quite complex. I made this site to hopefully interest you in joining them.