word - Twelve Labours - #03 Golden Hind

_{This puzzle is part of the ‘Twelve Labours’ series. Previous instalments can be found here: Prologue | 01 | 02}

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Hercules was grateful the morning sun wasn’t hotter as he pulled the heavy flatbed trolley laden with crates up Hippocrates Hill and along Aristotle Avenue to the Golden Hind. Arriving out of breath, he knocked at the deliveries entrance and the door was answered by the landlady, Artemis.

“Oh wow, Hercules – did you drag that all the way here?! You must be exhausted – come in, come in.”

Hercules picked up a crate and heaved it inside. Although he hadn’t recognised the name, the pub felt strangely familiar to him...

“Didn’t this use to be the White Swan?”

“Oh, a long time ago now!” chuckled Artemis. “It’s been the Golden Hind for the last month. Before that it was the Black Dog, the Golden Ram... You might say I’ve got a thing for coloured animals!”

Hercules lifted the lid of the crate and was met by the sight of 169 bottles of various colours, with letters on their caps, and a variety of odd symbols stencilled onto the wooden rim of the crate itself. A slip of paper on the top listed the names of the beverages to be found within. Hercules sighed.

“This is another puzzle, isn’t it?”

“Of course!” replied Artemis. “You see, I borrowed something from your mother and she would like it back. You just need to work out what that item was, given what you see before you...”

Hercules frowned. “Did you customise this crate yourself? Hang on – did you go down to the wholesalers already, open this up, do something weird to it, and then leave it there for me to bring all this way?!”

“May-be...” said Artemis, a little guiltily. “It is very heavy... Anyway, search around and see what you can find. Just beware – I’ve got a thing for coloured animals, remember...”

TASK: Solve this enigmatic puzzle to find the 13-letter object Artemis borrowed from Hercules’ mother. Watch out for those ‘coloured animals’...

_{Bottle-cap text reproduced below for copy-paste purposes:}

NOMTAWOSINODA  
RRIDRETEMEDSE  
ADLOGDETILFOX  

WSETUOBACKNYI  
AEMOHGRCHUMTS  
SDISEGEKSCANU  
YENNAIADSFLEE  
PMOOSNSERATWH  
PITGULURETDTT  
AHAREMUCHEAIE  
HCUOZSELSELEM  
NRRGWHERBREWU  
UAACHILLESELR

_{Grid of colours and list of unicode symbols available in source, if required.}

Answer

Take the descriptions of the bottles,

and index into the titles by each part of the percentages. (Indexing is a common puzzle hunt tactic: if you have a list of words/phrases and a number corresponding to it, take the (number)-th letter of the phrases.) For example, ALE ZEUS is rated 7.6%: take the 7th and 6th letters of ALE ZEUS and you get S and U.

Skipping all zeroes, the parts before the decimal spell START TOP LEFT. The parts after the decimal spell USE THE D-PAD.

So, to follow that new instruction:

Start in the top left corner, moving right. Whenever you hit a letter representing a direction, turn to move Up, Down, Left, or Right.

When doing this, the path takes you to nearly every bottle:

The path starts at the cyan here, then changes to yellow, then to orange, and then to red.

The unused letters spell out the item: a BACKSCRATCHER.

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A list of all of the other messages in the puzzle, useful or not:

The bottles:

Most of the bottle colors have a message in them.
- Dark green: NOT A CLUE
- Light green: ALSO NOT A CLUE
- Orange: FAKE TRACE
- Pink: WHITE LIES, reversed

- Light red: HERRING, reversed - Purple: RANDOM NOISE, anagrammed
- Dark red: RUBBISH MIXED UP, anagrammed
- Yellow: UNHELPFUL ANAGRAM, anagrammed

- White: WORD SEARCH
- Dark gray: DOT TO DOT AZUL
(The remaining three blue colors do not spell anything, and the light gray color that uses the majority of the bottles also does not spell anything.)

Following the first instruction from the bottles:

Solving the word search (using the beverage names as a word list), and looking at the remaining letters, you get: "NOT A WORD SEARCH, SEEK CLUES ELSEWHERE".

Following the second instruction from the bottles:

Drawing lines between bottles of each blue color, you get "ABV". This is a hint to turn to the ABV percentages given with the beverages, which leads you down the correct path.

The symbols:

The first letters of the symbols, reading around, spell a message: ONLY TWO CHARACTERS ARE RELEVANT. OTHERS ARE JUST DISTRACTING.

This refers to the greater than sign and the caret, which mark the start and end of the path in the true solution.

The beverage descriptions:

The first letters of the beverage descriptions tell you "ONLY FOR FLAVOUR", which says that the descriptions are otherwise irrelevant.