Faye and Maciek's Adventures in the frosty Canadian North
“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.
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
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.
You can use Aeroplan points to travel up North! Not all the way to Tulita of course, but First Air is an Aeroplan partner and flies to destinations such as Norman Wells, Inuvik, and Fort Simpson. Which means that you can use 25,000 points to get between anywhere in Canada or the continental US and Norman Wells (flight rewards chart here), and then pay only $233 (each way) to do the short hop to Tulita.
The key detail is that you can’t book the flight on Aeroplan’s website. I tried doing this a while back and concluded that points-based flights were impossible, but I recently learned that you have to call Aeroplan to make the booking. There are limited seats available. I was chatting with a guy from Inuvik who flies on points to visit family in Newfoundland, and he said that he usually books 10 months in advance. I’m not sure if that’s standard for all the northern routes, but it’s definitely worth investigating.
If you wanted to redirect all this money you just saved on flights into making your trip up North more awesome, one option might be to fly up to Norman Wells on points, then do a canoe trip down the Keele River (which brings you from near the park back to Tulita), and then you can either fly or paddle back to Norman Wells and depart from there.
Read our earlier posts about Northern Airlines and Paddling Trips in the NWT.