This is not just a converted warehouse full of offices in north London. No, Britannia Row used to be Pink Floyd’s recording studios. Now though, a receptionist, a flower arrangement and a labyrinth of corridors hide all sorts of businesses.

One of these is Tony Conigliaro’s Drink Factory, a laboratory/office that plays headquarters to Tony C’s inventory of imbibing. Behind that door there’s a large kitchen area that has been taken over by water baths, centrifuges, florence flasks and all manner of little bottles. Inside these bottles there are more smells than you could ever imagine existed. And this is what Conigliaro is passionate about: smell and taste.

“The Drinks Factory started as a blog over the past seven years. This has put me in touch with people I wouldn’t necessarily meet,” he says.

Opposite the kitchen area – or lab as it looks and is called now – are high shelves with rows and rows of jars containing everything from gin botanicals, different woods, several types of honey and loads of different teas. On the floor, there’s a pine tree branch and the air smells a bit like Christmas.

When I ask Conigliaro, 40, about inspiration for drinks, he takes up a pen and paper and draws a kind of flow-chart as we talk – he did attend art school after all. In fact, we’re sitting on a sofa, with a clear perspex ‘black’ board in front of us and he’s talking about the types of people that have passed through the Factory door – “fashion designers, set designers”, he says.

Perhaps he’s more Andy Warhol than Heston Blumenthal. “Drinks start like a story,” he says, and draws. “The Woodland Martini, for example, was inspired by a walk in the woods in Portland, Oregan. First the light, then it becomes darker the deeper into the woods you go and then there’s the woodland smell.”

He describes the sunlight as citrussy notes in gin, umami from sherry and the woodland as bitters made from wood in the lab. “Rather than look at bitters as providing top and bottom notes [to a drink], we made it with all base notes,” he adds.

Really Conigliaro began walking down that forest path 13 years ago, after a conversation with chef Bruno Loubet about applying elements of cuisine to drink. Incidentally, Loubet is the chef behind Zetter Hotel, the home of Conigliaro’s second bar, Zetter Townhouse (or ZTH).

Food v drink

So why did he pursue the drinks side and not food? “I see it as a hybrid, really,” he responds. “No one had done it with drinks. It’s about creating that experience and language but with a much shorter parameter.”

After all, usually people don’t spend a few seconds chewing a drink. Conigliaro attempts to arouse the same kind of taste sensation in the time it takes for the drink to pass over the tongue and slip down the back of the throat.

Then there’s smell (I forgot to mention that the jar-laden shelves also display a good number of perfumes and aftershaves). “Making perfume is a distillation process,” he says. “Drinks such as Chartreuse and vermouths have a link back to alchemy.”

Again, he is drawing a series of lines and shapes on his notepad. Take the Rose cocktail – a drink which took two years to conceive. “We basically made a food grade essence from roses. We tried loads of different types of roses.”

A sugar cube in the bottom of the glass contains the rose essence and the bubbles, or ‘flavour-carriers’ as Conigliaro calls them, take the smell to the drinker’s nose. The further down the drink you go, the closer you get to the source and the more powerful the aroma becomes.

It’s worth noting here that Conigliaro has no formal scientific training and, although some 80%-90% of the ingredients on the bars’ lists are homemade, he doesn’t necessarily believe it’s always best to make it yourself.

“I’ve made a few mistakes,” he says, although they were in the lab, so at least, he says “I was doing that, though, not serving it to the customers. “If there’s something better out there, we’ll use it. I’d love to be able to make a vermouth for example.”

The next logical step seems like distilling, given that craft distilleries are popping up all over the UK at the moment. “I’d love to but I don’t know what I’d make. Something different. Craft distilling is really healthy for the industry.”

Perhaps another bar then? “No plans yet. We’re happy at Drinks Factory – it’s nearly finished!”

When I ask about money, Conigliaro seems less impassioned. “The Drinks Factory [which includes four full-time staff] funds itself,” he says. Then there are eight bartenders and a bank of freelance/part timers. “My brother Simon runs the company,” he says. And that line of questioning closes.

Fiction meets fact

Both 69 Colebrooke Row and Zetter Townhouse show different sides to Conigliaro’s personality. Colebrooke is understated, neat. “It’s not based on Japanese bartending per se, but small intimate Japanese bars. Zetter is a nice contrast.”

Walking into Zetter is like stepping into an old lady’s living room, circa 18th/19th century, complete with chintz and a taxidermy cat with a parasol. In fact, to all intents and purposes, it is an old lady’s living room. And who is this old lady?

“Wilhelmina owns the house but the idea is that you’ve always just missed her,” explains Conigliaro before going on to start telling stories about the fictional character and the drinks she has influenced. “Well she likes to travel so the drinks have stories as well – like the Master at Arms, when she’s travelling with the merchant navy.” An interesting alter ego to say the least.

So what happens when you want a drink in one of these places? Do you stand there thirsty while some twit with a bunsen burner explains the ins and outs of hydrosols (water or steam distillations of flowers or herbs)? No. “At 69, we have a good proportion of people who come on a cocktail pilgrimage but then we have a good base of regulars. People do come because they just want a drink. That’s very important.

“It gets talked about if needs be but otherwise, why would we talk about how many times we’ve centrifuged something? A bar should be a bar, not a science lab. That all gets a bit egotistical to say the least.”

And it doesn’t do to let an ego get in the way of a good bar.

** Conigliaro has just released a book entitled Drinks. It is priced at £20 and published by Ebury Publishing.