Solution to Evan Birnholz’s Sept. 25 crossword, “Raise Your Glasses”

Six starred answers in this puzzle don’t appear to fit their clues. 25A: [*Retreats in the woods] seems to be LOG, but that doesn’t match part of speech. 49A: [*Prolonging] looks like DRAG, but that’s an incomplete answer.

The theme is revealed at the bottom of the puzzle at 117A: [“Cheers!” … and a hint to how six words in this puzzle have been raised by one row] which is DRINK UP. Six different alcoholic drinks hidden inside longer phrases have been lifted up by one row. You start in the square where the starred clue begins, move up by a row to spell out the drink, then return back to the original row to complete the answer.

As usual, I stuck to a constraint that all answers in the grid had to be real words, so you wouldn’t end up with a gibberish string of letters at the beginning or ends of the theme entries. I also wanted the drinks to be raised up from the middle of phrases so you could come back down to the original row, but there’s only a handful of alcoholic drinks that allow you to do this. Besides the six featured in this puzzle, there’s RUM, but there just aren’t many phrases where you can lift up RUM and get valid words on both sides of it — SPREAD RUMORS and UGLY RUMORS were a couple of the only decent ones I found after searching for a while. I found ANIMAL TRAINER which could raise up MALT, but I didn’t know if “malt” by itself could be a stand-in for “malt liquor.” The only one I saw for SAKE was KEEPSAKE BOX. I don’t think I even bothered looking for phrases with five-letter drinks, but maybe there was a good one hiding somewhere in the universe.

Some other answers and clues: