Non-Alcoholic Drink Guides by Family and Style

The families below are not arbitrary. Each one shares a mechanism, and that mechanism is what makes its pages worth reading together.

Tea, coffee and matcha are extraction problems, where the question is what comes out of a leaf or a bean and how fast. Cocoa and the milk drinks are suspension problems, where nothing dissolves and the work is keeping solids and fats where you want them.

Soda is a physics problem before it is a flavour one, because dissolved gas is always trying to leave. Juice and smoothies split on one decision about fibre, and hydration drinks differ from plain water only by what has been dissolved into them.

Two sections cut across all of it. Ingredients covers what you add to any of these drinks, and methods covers the equipment, because a brewer belongs to a mechanism rather than to a drink.

Read across the families and the same handful of variables keeps returning: temperature, time, grind or particle size, water, and what was added after.