Mixolometragrobology – Get in the Spirit!

Mixolometagrobologist Steve Canfield decided to go all out for his exchange puzzle in last year’s International Puzzle Party (IPP) and deliver a Sequential Discovery (SD) cocktail for us to savor.  After all, he was the host and wanted to make a big splash by leveraging his vast knowledege of puzzle Boxes and Booze to create an intoxicating journey with a bittersweet ending.  To aid him in this grand endeavor, he enticed puzzle genius and master craftsman Lee Krasnow to flesh out the intricate details that make this puzzle shine.

Get in the Spirit! consists of multiple layers of intrigue.  The outside is turned from aluminum with a Walnut and Hard Maple center ring to provide a classy classic look.  This shiny work of art may not look all that difficult but aluminum parts encapsulating various devious movements ring true.  After I solved it, I tested this in a manner that I’m sure will resonate with everyone.  I suspended both and struck them to verify the sonority of each.  Both produced a very nice tone with the top straining longer to sustain its note.

As for the goal, the shaker shaped tag simply said Get in the Spirit!  Preparing for just that, I happily embarked on my SD spiritual journey.  But where to start?  It’s a shaker!  You’re supposed to shake it, right?  Right?  Not so much.  Tilting and rotating will do.  As a matter of fact, I’d recommend not shaking it.

Through the holes in the top, you can just make out a red logo on a dark green background but don’t strain your eyes.  What could it be?

All three parts of the shaker seem to rotate freely and as you twist it and move it around you can hear things moving inside.  I was starting to fear that it might be one big marble maze and was particularly worried about the bottom portion.  I hear that people sometimes get lost in their cups.

With a little bit of exploration, the first move can be found, revealing the first glimpse of the interior.  I’m embarrassed to admit that this initial freebie move took me a full 10 minutes but I was going to savor this journey, by golly.  And with a little bit of additional work, the outer shell was peeled away to reveal … the next layer.

The interior is mostly 3D printed garnished with some metal hardware to facilitate making things more difficult.  Welcome to the inner circle, which sports 5 windows around it’s circumference.  And the inner circle has it’s own inner circle with it’s own set of windows.  It’s obvious that a lot of additional work went into making the design aesthetically pleasing instead of resulting in a strictly utilitarian design.  When the windows line up, you get a glimpse of what is waiting inside.  Through another opening, you can get a good look at a trapped coin although there doesn’t seem to be a way to easily remove it.  

Now you have a clear view of that red logo on top, which kind of looks like the top of a bottle.  With some effort you can get the top of the bottle to stick out.  It seems like it would make a great handle to rotate the bottle inside, which I did.  Rotating clockwise works great!  Rotating counter-clockwise not so much.  It really is a bottle and proceeded to dribble it’s contents in my lap.  I obviously don’t know how to hold my liquor.  At least I managed to limit the damage by quickly retightening it and vowing to never make such an obvious mistake again.

With just one drink under my belt, I stopped making progress.  I hit THE WALL!  At this point I kept trying everything over and over and getting nowhere.  There seemed to be a lot of enticing round holes that were trying to tell me something, but all I was getting was a buzz.  Eventually, I packed it back up and put it to the side for a while, a long while, months, in fact it’s been about a year.  How embarrassing!

After taking it back out after all that time, I blocked out a weekend and quickly (or at least quicker than the first time) found myself back at the wall.  After spending another considerable amount of time looking for a way forward, I finally succumbed and asked permission to do something that I was reluctant to do.  And I received the rare go ahead.  Usually this is followed by lots of laughter as I try it.  However, this time I was lucky.  In hindsight, the puzzle does provide a hint on how to get over that wall but like all good puzzles, you don’t recognize it until it’s already too late.

After a few more moves, you eventually end up with a token that is a bottle of your accomplishment.  Or is it a bottle that is a token of your accomplishment.  In any event, you wind up with both a token and a bottle of spirits.  If you are adventurous, you can take everything completely apart into the dozens of components that make Get in the Spirit!.  

The reset takes much longer than the solve but that’s basically because you just freed up a nice little bottle of spirits.

And that red logo on the dark green background?  Turns out it’s HUA for the H. Underberg-Albrecht company that Herbert Underberg started the day he married Katharina Albrecht to produce natural herb bitters.  

In addition to Get in the Spirit!, the puzzle, Steve also produced Get in the Spirit, the book.  The book provides a collection of fine cocktail recipes and wisdom.  Of course each recipe has a photo of the cocktail with an amazing garnish. 

It is also possible that Lee will make a companion cocktail shaker stand to hold both puzzle and book versions of Get in the Spirit!  Of course it will be a puzzle box and will utilize pieces from Get in the Spirit! in the solving process.  The CAD drawings look amazing and can be seen on Lee’s website, Pacific Puzzleworks.  However the fate of this project is still in flux as insufficient preorders didn’t provide the volume required for the originally projected price point.  Maybe offering an all 3D printed version of Get in the Spirit! for folks that don’t own one but would like the cocktail shaker stand could salvage the original plan.