Listener 4102 Something's Brewing by Poat

[dr b]

Do I get to call firsties this week? I thought this was a nice puzzle. It was a lot easier to get the keyword than I thought it might be, and once you have that everything falls into place pretty quickly. I felt that a bit more could have been said about the removed letters in the down clues.

[tristram37]

I must be in a minority of one here and feel very chastened that everybody so far has completed this puzzle. I have solved all the clues, but find that the removed letters in down answers in 4 cases occur in unchecked squares; but I can see no connection between the collection of (apparently) random removed letters, the keyword and the 6 across answers which are encoded. Previous answers have referred to a story which everybody seems to have read. What story is that? I have googled (what I take to be) the keyword but it don't tell me no story. What's going on?

[cluelessJoe]

tristram37 - since you have solved all the clues, even with those unchecked removals, you are down to a choice of just 2 letters for each of those particular entries. That gives you a maximum of 16 ways to make sense of that collection of letters, and there will not be many of those which make any kind of sense, so try a bit harder on that little lot and you should get there.

[AndrewG-S]

tristram37, I got stuck where you are for a long time, until I realised that I had an incorrect answer for one of the extra letter clues, once I fixed that it all came together very quickly. So worth rechecking those answers

[x_word_fan]

Good to read a thread with no-one complaining. Most enjoyable puzzle with (for me)clear instructions about the encoding - I usually get confused which direction the coding is to be done.

[IntoTheBlue]

Finally finished this late last night.

Like others it took me ages to get going as I had to chip away to make inroads. Once I'd realised what was going on it didn't take long to identify the theme as I dimly held recollections of it already and thence to the enciphering.

I enjoyed 5d and 20d as well but was held up longer than I should have been by an erroneous entry in the top left quadrant. (Note to self... when will I learn not to put answers in the grid until they are parsed correctly!)

Thanks to Poat for a most enjoyable evening which made the viewing of Andy Murray's demise more palatable.

IntoTheBlue

[dr b]

I noticed yesterday that our very own Jogler was the winner for Listener 4098 (Language Balancing). Congrats!!

[contendo]

Filled the left-hand half but it's slow progress for the rest. Why does the Answerbank Listener thread keep going AWOL?

[Jogler]

Thank you dr b :) There was a distinct flavour of cheerfulness in the house that day! On the plus side, the arrival of a new BRB will mean a fresh key to access the Chambers Online!

[Ruthrobin]

I've been away for three days and have only just completed my grid (with no electronic aids - quite a challenge!) The story is familiar but I am now struggling to find my cipher. I liked 22 and 35 ac. too but wonder how people managed before it was possible to feed those extra letters into a machine and come up with a pleasant surprise (that should have been obvious!)

[jamesah]

Very enjoyable, I remember the theme from a recent TV programme(a repeat). I'm still baffled by some word-play (27 and 39ac) and the definition to 24ac.

[tristram37]

All done now - I have no recollection of ever having heard the story!

[Clamzy]

I thoroughly enjoyed Poat's offering this week so I'd like to offer my thanks.
In the past answerbank posters have expressed some unease about puzzles which have non-words in the final grid. I don't see how this could have been avoided in this case, but maybe any setters among you could say whether it would have been possible to decode the other way round i.e., real words in the grid.

[contendo]

Jamesah - There is no 24 ac. If you mean 23 ac I share your bafflement.

[AndrewG-S]

On 23ac, I think I can just about convince myself it fits with the second meaning per BRB

[cluelessJoe]

Clamzy - the likes of Radix and Sabre are code wizards, and could possibly come up with real words which encode to other real words. You could of course have a rubbish-looking letter combination which would encode to a real word in final form - but then how do you go about clueing/defining XCVYWEHB in the first place?
Rr ... yes, feeding extra letters into a machine frequently helps, but this time the preamble does kind of point you at column order (rather than clue order), so if you just write them out in the former, it's probably one of those occasions when you can cope without a de-jumbling aid.

[Ruthrobin]

Yes, Clueless Joe, thanks, I got there - it was just the rather astonishing words I had across the top (when some 'double' letter choices were not resolved) that didn't immediately give me the theme 'story'. Without giving anything away - I was trying to bake things or brew spouts and so on.

[Cruncher]

Re: 23ac - think Indian curry. I still can't see the wordplay for 27ac but haven't tumbled to the "compliance" part of the clue. I thought this was an elegant puzzle if not quite as astonishing as Poat's Rules of Construction last year where, I for one, only spotted the hidden central grid very near the end.

[trux]

Clueless Joe (et al.) : surely the point here is that the words should remain enciphered nonsense (as the were in the "story", so that they cannot be immediately understood) ? All the more elegant, & faithful, in MHO.

[Zabadak]

Cruncher: check any piece of electrical equipment you have (your mouse or keyboard for example) and two letters should be consistently there. Look them up in BRB.

[Scorpius]

I thought this was a fairly straightforward puzzle despite the letters latent. It was certainly far easier than "Rules of Construction".
However, 27 across was definitely not straightforward. Cruncher, if you're still baffled, by the wordplay the easiest starting point is check the entries under 'hole' in Bradford's.