Cactus Canyon

How to Solve

The bottles, in order, clue the following phrases:

EAGLE MOTHER
DOG WHISTLE
HILL CROWN
BABY BIRD
SIDE TABLE
PIG WAR
ROYAL YELLOW
ROCK HUDSON
ROSE FIRE

With the help of the title and the flavor (“Our old-fashioned spirits bring heaven to Earth”), solvers may be steered to looking for whiskey names to complete the ladder (rusty nail and old fashioned are both whiskey cocktails), where the blended whiskeys above are the intermediaries.

When ordered correctly, the word HEAVEN connects with the first word of one of the answers above to make a whiskey brand. Then, the second word of that two-word answer connects with the first word of the next answer to make another whiskey brand, and so on until the final answer connects with the word EARTH to make the final whiskey brand. The ladder is as follows:

HEAVEN
HILL CROWN
ROYAL YELLOW
ROSE FIRE
SIDE TABLE
ROCK HUDSON
BABY BIRD
DOG WHISTLE
PIG WAR
EAGLE MOTHER
EARTH

The real whiskeys are HEAVEN HILL, CROWN ROYAL, YELLOW ROSE, FIRESIDE, TABLE ROCK, HUDSON BABY, BIRD DOG, WHISTLE PIG, WAR EAGLE, and MOTHER EARTH.

When indexed into by the numbers in the first column and ordered as the bottles appear, the word LOCATIONS is spelled. This tells the solver to find the locations of the distilleries that make the real whiskeys, which are as follows:

These fit into the rows of whiskey glasses, where the full glasses (bold letters) spell out SMUDGE RANK. The solver must notice that the pictured bottles all contain the phrase “Blended and Bottled by Penny World Puzzling Company”, and that some number of these words are smudged in each picture. Between 0 and all 8 words are smudged. Since it’s a ranking, these must be put in descending order, from ROCK HUDSON, where 8 words are smudged, to DOG WHISTLE, where none are smudged.

The final set of pictured bottles have arrows on the labels, either moving in the forward direction (or right) a certain number of spots or in the backward direction (or left) a number of spots, plus one that just has an equal sign. To solve the clue, one must index into these names again, but this time to a different letter, denoted by the arrows (the same letter for the equal sign). The original index for ROCK HUDSON was 10, and the first bottle has four arrows pointing to the left, so the new index for this bottle is 6, giving a U.

The extracted letters make the final answer, UNIMBIBED.

Background and Credits

This was originally conceived as a possible meta puzzle idea, where the “blended” whiskey names would have been feeder answers. Yar Woo encouraged me to make it a regular puzzle instead.

The initial concept I came up with was a bit too straightforward for Mystery Hunt, with just crossword style clues for the blended whiskey names and a simple ladder with indexing to get the final answer.

Asher Walkover gave me the idea to create visual clues for the blended whiskey names by making fake whiskey labels.

Todd Etter encouraged me to add an extra step to give some meat to the puzzle and suggested distillery locations as a data source. Surprisingly, I was able to index into those location names to come up with a reasonable message (SMUDGE RANK) that I could use for one final step, and make this a MH-worthy puzzle.