The flavor chart

Every drink in Riffed — the classics, your riffs, even your own palate — is drawn the same way: a radar chart with three stacked layers. Once you can read one, you can read them all.

The 21 dimensions

A drink is scored on 21 flavor dimensions, split into three groups:

Taste — sweet, sour, bitter, salty, umami, heat, and dilution. The structural things your tongue reports.
Aromatic — citrus, herbal, floral, spiced, smoky, fruity, earthy, and funky. What you smell — which is most of what you'd call "flavor."
Texture — body, creamy, fizz, dry, viscosity, and temperature. How the drink feels in your mouth.

Each dimension runs from 0 to 10, with 5 as the neutral midpoint — the level where that quality neither stands out nor is missing. Most drinks sit a little above neutral on a handful of dimensions rather than pinning any single one.

Reading the shape

A spirit-forward drink at rest — three layers, one per group.

The chart plots how far each dimension sits above neutral. The drink's strongest dimension reaches the rim, and everything else is drawn relative to it — so the shape shows you what a drink leads with, not absolute intensity. A Daiquiri spikes toward sour and citrus; an Old Fashioned leans into bitter and spice. The silhouette is the drink's signature, and after a while you'll recognize whole families of drinks by shape alone.

Each of the three groups gets its own polygon, stacked like panes of glass — aromatics in front, taste behind it, texture at the back.

Bringing a group forward

The taste layer brought forward, with its axes labeled.

Tap a group — the Aroma / Taste / Texture key by the chart, or the polygon itself — and that layer comes forward: full opacity, labeled axes, the other two receding behind it. That's how you isolate one question ("how sweet is this, really?") without the aromatic layer talking over the answer. Tap again and the layers settle back into their stack.

From a forwarded layer you can go one level deeper: tap a labeled dimension to see which ingredients drive it, and what would boost or soften it.

Where you'll meet it

The chart is everywhere the drink is. It sits on the cards on your home screen, on every drink's detail page, and it moves live in the riff editor as you swap ingredients and nudge amounts — the fastest way to build an intuition for what each bottle actually does to a drink. Your palate gets drawn with the same chart, so you can hold your taste up next to any drink and see where they agree.

A Negroni's detail page: ABV and Sources, flavor tags, the flavor chart beside the drink's illustration, the build with amounts, and similar drinks. — The Negroni's chart beside its illustration — and tapped open into the full-screen version.

The expanded flavor chart for a Negroni: the full-screen chart with Aroma, Taste, and Texture pills and the drink's balance sections. — The Negroni's chart beside its illustration — and tapped open into the full-screen version.

Curious where the numbers themselves come from? That's the next guide.