Solution: Substitute
Answer: ICE COOLED
Written by Janice Heng
The syntax in the second half might be familiar to solvers. If not, Googling part of the flavourtext (“almost, but not quite, entirely unlike”) or looking up lists of puzzle-solving tools can lead you to Nutrimatic.org.
The clues in the first half are intentionally vague. So try the Nutrimatic queries, and look for commonalities in the results.
As stated at the top of Nutrimatic.org, the tool takes its name from a machine in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy that produces a beverage almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea. Among the results of each query is a type of tea.
Solvers aren’t expected to be tea experts; once the tea aha is reached (Darjeeling and lapsang souchong might be among the more recognisable ones), the idea is that solvers can toggle between Nutri results and a list of teas to triangulate their way towards a complete tabulation.
The queries are alpha-ordered and the clues aren’t, so arrange the tea names in given clue order. (The links between the non-English names and the clues can be found on the Wikipedia pages of each tea type.)
As a confirmation mechanism, the query types also correspond to the language of each tea name: anagrams for Chinese teas, consonant/vowel substitution for Japanese teas, letter substitution for English teas, and exact phrase search for lapsang souchong, which is neither here nor there.
Extract the highlighted letter in each query for the final answer, ICE-COOLED.
| Clue | Tea | Query | Extracted letter |
|---|---|---|---|
| Material deity | TIEGUANYIN (iron Goddess of Mercy) | <AAaegnntuy> | I |
| Pine wood, small sort | LAPSANG SOUCHONG | "_____ng ______ng" | C |
| Hulled grain with bran remaining | GENMAICHA | CVCCaiCCa | E |
| Colonial island name | CEYLON | AeAAoA | C |
| Precious stone dew | GYOKURO (jade dew) | CyVCuCV | O |
| Mythical creature water source | LONGJING (dragon well) | <Al><Agginn> | O |
| Himalayan city | DARJEELING | AaAAAAAing | L |
| Covered | KABUSECHA | kVbVsVCCV | E |
| Pale flower | BAI MUDAN (white peony) | <Aaabimnu> | D |
The rise of Nutrimatic made me want to write a reverse-Nutri puzzle, where one reconstructs queries from a list of Nutri results. This isn’t that puzzle, but that’s where the idea came from. And given Nutri’s tagline, what could be more thematic than tea?