What Manner of Spirits Is This?

Inhale booze at London's new walk-in cocktail cloud http://t.co/1lBbTaar2b pic.twitter.com/eFzCsl5C9X

— CityLab (@CityLab) July 18, 2015

If you’ve never seen Londoners outrageously drunk, I can’t un-recommend it highly enough. But now there’s this:

A new cocktail spot in London doesn’t require taking a sip to get intoxicated — all you have to do is breathe. In a soon-to-come installation at London’s Borough Market called “Alcoholic Architecture,” drinks are served in the form of a “walk-in cloud of breathable cocktail.” The event description describes the “fully immersive alcohol environment” as an “alcoholic weather system.”

Guests enter a chamber filled with a thick mist that City Lab reports is “one part spirits to three parts mixer” and then proceed to intake alcohol through their lungs and eyeballs. The room is immensely humid — apparently it’s difficult to see more than a meter in front of you — and guests need to wear protective ponchos. Respiratory scientists have deduced that 50 minutes in the chamber is the equivalent of one liquid drink.

“Here’s mud in your eye” still isn’t real mud, but it is in your eye. And in your lungs.

Ew.

The best part of drinking isn’t the top shelf booze, although that I can and do recommend highly. The best part of drinking is the social aspect, of sharing with people you know and love, or would at least like to get to know and maybe love after Last Call. Drinking alone isn’t sad because it’s depressing or a sign of alcoholism; drinking alone is sad because you’re missing out on the best part of drinking.

And then there’s the ritual — the tiny pop of the cork being removed from your favorite scotch; the intricacies of a making a proper martini; the gentle shake over ice to chill your margarita; your favorite bartender saying hello and starting your first cocktail before you even get to the barstool. These simple acts bring us pleasure for no reason more complicated than that they are pleasurable.

Instead of all that then, you’re supposed to breathe booze vapor directly into your lungs and eyeballs, in a room more humid than a Mexico beach, and so foggy you can barely see the person with whom you’re “sharing” your “drink?”

Thanks, but I won’t be needing one for my baby or for the road.