All the Ingredients

Answer: V8

Explanation: This could be as SAD as it gets: the 8 squares with an 8 in it (8 through 78) contain the letter "V." Well, there's your V8, haha.

Wow! I coulda had a one ...much earlier if I wagged my hunch instead of finishing the grid and then counting :D Nice one, thanks!

Lol. That was the quickest meta solve in my life. I just felt like there were a lot of Vs as I was filling the grid. :D Thanks, Mikey.

I enjoyed how the mechanism gradually emerges. V8s are salt bombs, like most Campbell products...

Ok. But how about a beer for solving? Thanks, Mikey.

Delicious!

I hope everyone noticed the vegetable pieces crossing at the V's. To me that made this puzzle really special.

IN is in the grid 10 times plus the title! I really thought that was something.

Wow. Impressive construction!

Okay... now to backsolve. ... or to just click the reveal.

parsley unlocked this one for me - thanks mikey! i tried a low-sodium v8 once to try and be healthy... it was not pleasant

ILIKEIT OVERICE. Level V for me.

I didn’t take note of all the V’s for quite awhile. I found moon teas diagonally to be pretty interesting.

Great construction. I was sure this was going to be a beverage I had never heard of, but we drink V-8 all the time!

I pushed the laptop far enough away from me that I could see a giant 8, which was enough to go take a fifth look at mechapuzzle to see that there were, in fact, 8 Vs in the puzzle. Sheesh! I had tried highlighting TEA, ALE, VEG, INGREDIENTS, INT, and several other combinations of letters. Nice one!

I didn't see "the big 8" -- obviously the younger cousin of "the big W." I did see the v's but was trying (oh, so close) to make them spell vegetable, or something along those lines. Which leads me to ask -- Are we really not surprised that the veggie ingredients are arrived at by con"cat"enation of the pairs of clues!

What I did see in the grid was -- WASABI, in the WASI/SAAB crossing area; and NUTELLA, in the IFIFELL/NUT/TIA area. Maybe Campbell's will consider tossing those in as secret ingredients!

A wonderfully and oxymoronically elaborate "simple and difficult" production. Thanks, Mikey!

V for Victory... after 8 nutritious nudges!

My first thought was that if you combine the RUMS with all the Gingers in the clues and you could make a dark 'n' stormy.

After the hints, the only thing that stood out was that a lot of the clues (but not quite 16 of them) started with the letter W. But if you took all the clues that contained WHO, WHAT, WHERE, WHEN, HOW, or WHY there were exactly 16! I figured those had to be the 16 clues that had something unusual about the phrasing, mostly early in the clue. (They were not.)

It took a further nudge to look at letters and a trip back to Mechapuzzle (which I had already used and saw there were WAY more Is and N's and Geneva make a great gin and ILIKEIT (a G&T) OVERICE. Of course there is also a drink called a F-104 (46A) and the Meta # and several drinks with gin and other possible ingredients interpolated from the grid that have a 16 letter name. I can truly say I never would have gotten this. Perhaps if I had reviewed Mechapuzzle more carefully or, as Darth did, said WOW that is a lot of V's for a puzzle (cause we know those are hard). I can also say that I would never have arrived at the answer the "long" way. Innovative puzzle and interesting because I had thought of a V8 puzzle long ago but was just goign to have the veggies hidden in the grid or clues...MUCH more mundane. Thanks Mikey!

Oh, my other HUGE rabbit hole. INT in the middle crossing UNI and about twice the normal number of I's and N's for a puzzle that has All the INgredients. I was taking words with IN in the clue or IN in the Grid (there are a lot) but of course never got anywhere.