Author: Faye

Strange Frenchmen in the North

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It is rare for someone to accidentally find themselves in Tulita. There are plenty of out-of-town visitors for work, meetings, or other assorted reasons, but given the difficulties in getting here, it is usually a very intentional decision.

I saw this post on the community facebook group today:

“Weird thing happened last nite when working. As i was driving the back by pass, I seen two people walking in the dark, carrying big backpacks. At a distance, I was wondering what it was. Looks like moose walking into town lol. Pick them up and they hitch hike from wrigley yesterday. And they’re on there way to Inuvik. And wanted to know if there was a road from good hope to inuvik? I said nope. And they look sad … ohh they said. By the way, there from Belgium. Arrive in Canada 4 months ago. Hitch hike all the way up here since then.”

As it turns out, they are clowns who are doing some kind of hitchhiking-around-the-world as an interactive art project or something.

These clowns are not Tulita’s first inadvertent eccentric French visitors, however. In fact, they’re not even the first in the past year. This past August, a Quebec man was (willingly) blindfolded and dropped by helicopter somewhere in the Yukon wilderness, with a packraft and minimal other supplies. He found his way onto the Keele River, so Tulita was the first point of civilization that he encountered.

Here are some news articles about his expedition:

The North certainly attracts interesting people.

#NorthernProblems

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“My eReader stopped working. Apparently the ink in the screen freezes at -30°C.”

We decided that we need a hashtag for situations like this. Here’s another one:

Our work truck doesn’t work very well below -15°C, so we were planning to replace it with one from another northern park. But, someone accidentally left a window down and some food in the replacement truck last summer, so a bear got in and destroyed the interior of the truck. Now we don’t have a replacement truck.

Getting Serious About Ginger Beer

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We bought a glass carboy in Vancouver and brought it back with us, along with some brewing yeast. There’s nowhere nearby to get beer-making ingredients, but there is one thing that there’s plenty of up here: ginger. We have previously made very fizzy non-alcoholic ginger beer in Nalgene bottles by adding ginger, sugar, and bread yeast, which is an easy and effective way to make a fun beverage (takes about 2 days)*. But now it was time to get serious.

*Caution: this process creates high pressure and can be highly explosive

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Our first 10L batch of ginger beer

Ginger Beer Log

Jan 13 (3am): yeast added to wort
Ingredients:
- 1.5 kg white sugar
- 10 L water
- 250 g peeled, grated ginger
- 1 pkg EC-118 champagne yeast 

Jan 14: 150mL sampled, tastes very sweet, good amount of ginger

Jan 20: 200mL sampled, tastes less sweet, very good!

Jan 21: put 1L in a Nalgene with 1/2 tsp of brown sugar, 1cm air space

Jan 22: tried Nalgene ginger beer: not very carbonated, not sweet
- could use more sugar and time

Jan 25: distinct alcohol taste, not sweet, but good flavour
- filled 2 x 1L Nalgene, added 1 tbsp brown sugar to each

Jan 28: good amount of sweet and fizzy - not high pressure, but distinct bubbles

Jan 29: started new 1L Nalgene and 473mL glass bottle (with minimal sugar)

Feb 2: opened yellow Nalgene, no fizz on opening but some in drink, low sweet, strong tang flavour, insignificant fizz, definite alcohol taste (somewhat beer-like)

Feb 7: opened glass bottle - no fizz, no sweet, a bit bitter
- refilled yellow Nalgene with 2 tbsp white sugar

Feb 10: not sweet or too ginger-y or alcoholic. Tastes like weird water, not fizzy.

Feb 12: filled 0.5L bottle (2 tsp sugar), purple Nalgene (4 tsp sugar), 1L beer bottle (4 tsp sugar)

Feb 15: opened 0.5L bottle - no fizz, sugar has not been eaten by yeast (sweet taste), so yeast has clearly died somewhere in this process. Alcohol content doesn't kill yeast until about 15%, so it's probably not that. Mysterious.

Feb 19: opened 1L beer bottle - not very fizzy, but we were discussing that maybe champagne yeast makes smaller, less aggressive bubbles, so maybe the yeast is still alive and kicking. Subjective opinion is that the final alcohol level is probably around 7%.

Feb 22: opened yellow Nalgene - tons of fizz! Maybe we just haven't been letting it sit long enough? Alcohol level is for sure at least 7%.

The next batch of ginger beer was started on Feb 19 with an ale yeast - we will see what difference that makes.