Why it's all about immersive cocktail in experiences

Simply sipping an award-winning masterpiece of maverick mixology in a fancy bar is so yesterday: what the flâneur in search of their next luxury booze hit needs is an immersive drinking experience.

And naturally, the supremely lovely Blue Bar at The Berkeley can provide, with director of beverages Daniel Baernreuther’s new Out of the Blue experience. A year in the making, OOTB is, as Baernreuther puts it, all about ‘cocktail escapism’: total immersion in a sort of sensory chamber, where you drink unidentified cocktails while stimulated by sound, smell and visuals to guess your poison.

The OOTB experience is about ‘stripping back the cues that we are so used to in a bar, like garnish, glass, menu description, and allowing your senses, rather than your opinion about an ingredient or spirit, to take the lead,’ says Baernreuther.

Without a description, entrenched whisky deniers or celery haters might discover a love for a drink they’d never normally order; lacking visual cues, like a drink’s colour, your brain doesn’t make the same assumptions about flavour (eg, that an orange drink will taste citrussy, or a purple or pink drink of berries). Science aside, you’re at The Berkeley, so every cocktail tastes amazing.

Guests kick off with water and some rather lush lemon sorbet as a palate-cleanser, ‘in case you’ve had three pints of Guinness before you get here’, then head over to a discreet door that opens into a small blue-lit box with a table and four chairs, each with four double-walled ceramic glasses laid out to drink. Not only do these keep all four mini cocktails cold throughout the 30-minute event, they also make it impossible to tell what’s inside — every liquid looks black.

Then, we begin. Colourful videos worthy of an ICA installation play on all four sides, smells are pumped into the room and sounds echo around. And every sensory change really does affect the taste of the drink in front of you. Not to give too much away, but here are a couple of tips: the sound of cracking ice should help you define the spirit in one, while the smell of baking brioche brings out caramel sweetness in your next sip — and whisky doesn’t always burn.

And a heads up, if you happen to be a booze hound who knows they should meditate for their sanity but never finds the time for it: you get a 30-minute reprieve from your mental turmoil at Out of the Blue. There’s surely no better form of relaxation than being slightly tipsy in a sensory bath.

The Berkeley isn’t the only bar challenging drinkers’ booze perceptions.

At Jason Atherton’s City Social there’s an augmented reality cocktail menu to pep up your post-work session: download the app, point the camera at your drink when it arrives and it’ll be brought to life with video on screen. And for a not particularly sophisticated but crowd-amusing Christmas gang, Clerkenwell’s Dans Le Noir lives on plunging giggling boozers into the dark to fire up taste buds. There’s never been a better time to immerse yourself in alcohol.