All views expressed are that of the writer.

I’ve got into kombucha and water kefir. Not serious ones but the fashion prebiotics that speak to the idea of wellbeing and have the aesthetics of Bratz. There’s a bubblegum pink can; another one in the shade of dusky lilac that I’ve been looking for a dress in for the last year. Goth kombucha, acid and gloomy behind the tint of the bottle. You can make your own kombucha, I think, but I don’t really care to learn. I want a little elixir in the sun – lavender-flavoured kefir, maybe raspberry kombucha, or mint, basil or hops. In reality, all of them have a flavour profile that’s just “sharp”: a note of vinegar and the effervescent, tongue-prick feeling of quick, large bubbles.

This isn’t the first time I’ve gotten into fluid-whispering. At one point it was pomegranate juice. I’ve done Yakult. There’s been a symphony of green – juices, sencha, matcha, smoothies, shots. I tried Huel during the peak meal-drink years but it was too undignified even in the name of research. By design, none of these has any bearing on the food I eat. The glow juice, the vibration tonic, the restorative ether… it’s a vibe-based logic according to which I can imbibe health without even having to chew.

Drinks are powerful right now, especially in the era of the gut. As far as the cultural read goes, our intestines used to be simple: twenty-ish feet of food processing apparatus with the formal complexity of a French horn. Now they’re the locus of our emotional life and cognitive function. They’re also home to a microbiome that we have to attend to, discipline and feed like a pet. It can’t be a coincidence that the gut generation is also a generation raised on Tamagotchis. Fluids promise an easy fix. One of the biggest drink launches of the past year wasn’t a new flavour of Coke or even hype herbal non-alcoholic aperitivos, but ZOE gut shots – an M&S vendable rebrand of ancient milk kefir.

We’ve been here before. Galenic medicine was based on a fluid logic that people and substances could be put in categories based on how closely they jibed with blood, phlegm, black or yellow bile. Liquids are the problem, diagnosis, language and cure. Biblical wine, ceremonial drinks, coffee, Red Bull. The late Victorians really ran with this idea. “Space is an ocean of ether in which our solar system swims” is not the trapezoid opening credits of a Star Wars movie but an early twentieth century ad for Dr Pepper. It was “the king of beverages”, “liquid sunlight”, “a great natural law”, vim, vigour, vitality, a curative beverage. It was “solar energy-liquid sunshine.” How gullible must people have been, you think, until you remember the associative triumvirate of Coca-Cola: sunlight fractured through a full glass bottle; sculpted abs and a Diet Coke; Santa Claus. Like Dr Pepper, Coca-Cola also started as a temperance beverage – a solution containing caffeine and the psychoactive compounds of cocaine.

The original British elixir – over a century before ZOE or Innocent smoothies – was iron brew. Iron brew is a Scottish inheritance, the people’s Balmoral, created from the waters of the Clyde running over rust-lichened girders. In 1901, the Barr family came up with a recipe for what would eventually be known as iron brew, a miracle cure like Grandpa Simpson’s revitalising tonic. Ads gave it credit for enriching the blood and brain and regulating the nervous system. It was “the most valuable tonic and delicious beverage ever offered to the public.” Because of everything Iron Brew isn’t (iron-based, brewed), A.G. Barr was eventually lassoed by British trade law and changed the name to Irn-Bru – like a name muttered under your breath, audible but not really litigable. Today it’s the most famous version of the drink, a metonym for the genre like Hoover or Sellotape.

Irn-Bru lore, like most lore, is mainly fantasy. It was probably invented around 1890 in the labs of a chemicals firm in New Jersey better known for making nail polish. Ten years before A.G. Barr was making it in Scotland, the drink was selling out in Jamaica – a late nineteenth century precursor to the viral Prime energy drinks “that has sprung up like a young tree into a giant… a favourite and stand by for the thirsty Jamaica people.” The logo was a flexed arm wielding a hammer. In Scotland, it’d flesh out to become the Irn-Bru strongman – based on a Highland athlete called Adam Brown, with Roman sandals and a Tom Selleck moustache.

This doesn’t tally with today’s ginger nectar. Adverts for Irn-Bru include someone headbutting a shopkeeper, an automatic door opening on a person on a train toilet, “MADE FROM GIRDERS”. Scotland’s other national drink has gone from being one of the tincture bottles of the travelling medicine man to a surrealist project. Nobody realistically thinks that Irn-Bru is medicine. Some people, following the logic that the only real food is stuff that your great great grandmother would have recognised as edible, would say it’s not even food. Obviously this doesn’t account for the great great grandmothers of Kingston, Jamaica, who did mainline those early iron brews. It also doesn’t make room for the possibility that we might want things not because they’re useful or nutritious, but because they’re fun.

You’d think that advertising regulations would have stymied the artistry of the old-fashioned quack, but a couple of years ago the delusion economy gave us MoonJuice, a health food and supplement company and one of the most extreme manifestations of New Age wellness. MoonJuice sells dissolvable powders or what it describes as “cellular waters”. One of them, called Ting™, is an energy and serotonin-boosting infusion with a B Complex derived from tulsi and guava. It “provides cofactors” and hacks something to do with “cellular currency”. Another rhetoric infusion is a nighttime shot that helps you to microdose melatonin and tastes like organic blackberries.

As far as the elixir age goes, MoonJuice was the nadir, but the spirit persists, mellower and more oblique. My cute kombucha doesn’t make too many big claims but it knows it can rely on my imagination to fill in the gaps. What’s next? A spiritually anionic herbal tonic, with solar synergy and mood cells? You can get supplements tailored to your specific gut microbiomes, as unique to you as a fingerprint, which surely means it’s only a matter of time before you can buy a custom gut-supercharging cola.

Maybe the next big thing will be a yolk-orange plasma chaser infused with ferrous compounds, metabolically generative sugars and enlivening carbon dioxide gas. We won’t call it iron brew this time, but maybe Ferik, or Sunn, or Octane, depending on whether we’re going for the Red Bull school of thermodynamic branding or the pastel science of MoonJuice. Maybe I’ll get into it – buying a bottle for the vibes, knocking it back like the bubbles will change my life.