Tony Conigliaro's Drink Factory lurks in a nondescript building on the back streets of Islington. It used to be the studio where Pink Floyd recorded The Wall: once these walls reverberated to the fearful sound of Roger Waters's solipsistic angst, but today there's nothing more troubling than the gentle blip of a small still in which a lab technician is making horseradish-flavoured vodka.  

Conigliaro, the man behind London's 69 Colebrooke Row and the Zetter Townhouse is probably heartily sick of being described as the Heston Blumenthal of cocktails, but you can see why people do it. The atmosphere is one of a laboratory, complete with lab assistant and a centrifuge. He talks about imagining drinks, using ingredients that no one else has thought to use – they've been experimenting with eucalyptus – of reinventing long forgotten drinks from the days of the Roman Empire. Food scientists and perfumiers have been involved, as have chefs from El Bulli.

This is the cutting edge of cocktail making in Britain. I'm here because I love cocktails. I love drinking them. I love their sneakily anti-establishment history – a lot of the most famous ones were devised to mask the taste of bathtub alcohol during Prohibition – and the way they mirror changing tastes and social attitudes over the years. And I love making them at home, which according to Jared Brown, drinks and spirits consultant, cocktail historian and co-author of more than 30 books on the subject, makes me part of a trend, albeit unwittingly. "Making cocktails at home is far more popular than in the past. This is in large part because of the rise in popularity of artisanal cocktails, cocktail bars and 'bar chefs'," he says. "Consumers, exposed to it in more and more bars, cannot help bringing a bit of this new passion home."

I'd go as far as to say that making cocktails is my hobby, if that didn't sound perilously close to a piss-artist trying to gild his baser urges. That said, I'm not going to deny that getting at least slightly drunk is part of the fun. Cocktails are ultimately always about fun. Brown calls them "liquid cuisine", and he has a point, but they're devoid of the hand-wringing worthiness that's surrounded food in the last decade: there's no talk of terroir, or ethics. No one ever stared joylessly at a whiskey sour and sniffily enquired if your bourbon was locally sourced. Someone I know once opined that what he called the "two-pint buzz" was the finest drug experience known to man. Your average cocktail delivers something like the same perfect mood-lifting amount of alcohol in a more efficient form.

I don't remember the first time I ever drank a cocktail, nor can I remember a eureka moment in the shape of a perfectly mixed martini or velvety brandy alexander. They certainly weren't around much when I was growing up. The only cocktail I can remember my parents drinking was a champagne cocktail on Christmas Day: my mother held that the sugar and the brandy helped settle her stomach, which was but one among her impressive panoply of demented and entirely unfounded medical beliefs.

When I first met my wife, I made a fuss about taking her out for cocktails, but that definitely had more to do with trying to appear sophisticated than any abiding passion for them. I certainly liked margaritas, but even more I liked the idea of suggesting I was the kind of urbane young man-about-town who frequented cocktail bars – rather than, say, a hopeless, shambling idiot so permanently stupefied by his gargantuan marijuana intake that he considered making toast without setting anything on fire to be an achievement worthy of a Pride of Britain Award and a fly-past from the Red Arrows. If I'd taken her on a date reflective of the real me, she'd have spent the evening slumped on the sofa listening to Neil Young bootlegs while I cack-handedly attempted to fashion a bong out of a 2-litre coke bottle, then set myself on fire making toast – and even I wasn't stupefied enough to think that was the kind of thing that ladies liked.

So, cocktails it was, in Freud's, a subterranean Covent Garden bar with a death-trap staircase, and in the Heights, on the top floor of the hotel next door to Broadcasting House. We went there not because they were good bars, although they are. We went there because they were the only two cocktail bars I knew. Freud's was opposite the offices of a magazine I wrote for and the Heights was where I'd once interviewed Annie Nightingale: she told me about her friendship with Keith Moon ("a lovely man") while ordering drinks with a generosity that suggested at least one reason why she and the late Who drummer might have got on.

I suspect my current passion for cocktails has its roots in those early dates. I started making them in earnest when we first had children and our social life dwindled to nothing. At the time, I saw mixing a margarita for the two of us as a treat, a way of marking Saturday nights out, even if we were spending our Saturday nights in, hysterical with exhaustion in front of Strictly Come Dancing. But perhaps I was unconsciously trying to evoke something of the early months of our relationship, which were genuinely carefree in a way your life never really is – or at least shouldn't be if you've got any sense of responsibility – after kids and marriage and a mortgage. Perhaps I was trying to say: look, somewhere under the baby sick and breast pumps and the dried milk and Weetabix we're the same people that wobbled up the stairs at Freud's on a weekly basis. I'm not sure that's not what's driving the home cocktail renaissance Jared Brown talks about: I suspect that, like Twitter, it's largely populated by thirty- and fortysomethings, who've put the kids to bed.

Whatever the reason, I caught the bug, discovering, to my delight, that making cocktails is essentially easy, even if Tony Conigliaro and his centrifuge do a grand job of making it look impossible. I've had disasters, including an attempt to replicate Salvatore Calabrese's signature drink the Maestro that tasted like Benylin, and I've had surprise successes (who knew that tequila, lime juice, kahlua, egg white and sugar syrup would be so moreish?), but for the most part, they've turned out exactly as expected. They may be liquid cuisine, but it's cuisine anyone can do.

I've successfully mastered making toast without necessitating a call to the emergency services, but I'm a terrible, terrible cook, lacking the suitable confidence or judgment. But making cocktails – not in the Conigliaro sense of setting off on a mystical voyage of creativity, but in the sense of making something really nice to drink at home, something that might impress your guests more than beer or wine as an aperitif – is a doddle. A mint martini requires four ingredients: fresh mint, vodka, sugar syrup and ice and the ability to shake a cocktail shaker. The end result is fantastic. Furthermore, the amount it appears to impress people far outstrips any effort you've actually put into making it. And it gets you slightly pissed. This is surely the dictionary definition of a win-win situation.

And so, it has to be said, is standing in Tony Conigliaro's Drink Factory, enjoying his remarkable bloody mary. As a cocktail hobbyist, the only thing that troubles me is that his ideas seem literally inimitable. There's no way of replicating them at home. No, he smiles, but some of them can be copied – he's planning a book. He then goes on to describe a clear bloody mary that requires straining tomatoes through a muslin overnight. I tell him I think that sounds like a schlep, and he looks a bit disappointed. "You just have to prepare the night before, as if you were having a dinner party."

As I drain the last of my drink, that suddenly sounds like perfect sense. Which suggests it's time to leave, before I'm overwhelmed by the urge to buy a centrifuge on my way home.