Mark Beese

Camping Etiquette

Winter has released his icy grip on the Yukon, and that brings my favorite season: camping season. In early May I along with several friends pitched our campers and tents at Lake LaBerge. We lucked out and got choice sites along the lakeshore. As we settled in with dinner on the fire and a beverage …

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When Less is More

I was tricked by this book, The Paradox of Choice. I was sure this book was a great marketing book. I was drawn in by a great study conducted about jam. In the first part, they sampled six kinds of jam at a food store. In the next part they sampled 24 kinds of jam …

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Playing Politics With Beer

News out of Birmingham, Alabama this month has a local consumer lobby group calling for a boycott of all Anheuser-Busch products in the Birmingham/Jefferson County area due to anti-craft beer legislation in that state. Free the Hops/Alabamians for Speciality Beer’s President Stewart Carter notes that the call for the boycott comes as a response to …

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The Beer Police are Heroes

A new initiative in the UK’s Somerset County this summer will ensure that beer drinkers are not getting hosed at their favourite watering holes. Trading Standards Officers will be making the rounds throughout the county with beer measuring devices, ensuring that all glassware is certified to hold a true, 100 per cent liquid 20 fluid …

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Federal Campground is Nice, Too

HAINES JUNCTION There are numerous campgrounds in and around Haines Junction. Your YTG Campground permit will let you camp at most of them … but the Kathleen Lake Campground is not one of them. The Kathleen Lake Campground is a federal campground that lies just inside the borders of the Kluane National Park: a “World …

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Fill the Parks

There are two things that really frustrate me — and they are related. First, the couches in my house have permanent dents from the backsides of my kids. “Go outside and do something,” I say, echoing the words from the mouths of my parents when I was a kid. Of course the same resistance exists …

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This Beer Really is For You

One of the things that a business in your community can do that companies Outside cannot is treat you like you — as an individual — matter. I have seen tubes of lip balm turn up at meetings or events that have the logo of the event on them, thanks to the efforts of Aroma …

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700,000,000,000 Bottles Of Beer On The Wall (would take 220,000 years to sing)

We feel the need to make a few comments on the $700 billion subsidy that has been the big financial news in the US last month. We have a real hard time trying to get our heads around that number, 700 billion. It sure seems like a lot of zeros. Global beer production last year …

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When Religion is in the Mix

There are few more dangerous waters for the Buzz to float down than mixing beer and religion. And yet, being the brave souls that we are, go there we must. We can do that, we think, because we are a craft brewer. After all, we belong to an industry that has spawned such potentially offensive …

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Lots of Empty Barrels to Wear

In case you have been living in a vacuum over the past few weeks, apparently these are hard times. Funny how things seemed to turn around so fast … or maybe not so funny, depending on your perspective. We hear that beer is pretty much recession-proof. We have long argued that this is true to …

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Doing What Breweries Do Best

As we get nearer to our upcoming and excellent adventure, distilling, we get more and more questions about the process. So we thought we would turn the Beer Buzz into the Booze Buzz, at least for this column. We get asked the same two questions all the time. The first is, “What are you going …

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Guatemala’s greatest asset is its people

Guatemala has so many great elements to it, but the highlight of our trip (if you’ve read my other stories you may notice a common thread) was the people. Every country has exotic “ethnic” foods that are critical to a good vacation. There is always beautiful, unique scenery and “traditional” entertainment. But the make-or-break element …

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Unless you’re Santa, I’d say it’s one of those …

Everybody knows beer causes beer bellies, right? Why else would they call it a beer belly? Not so fast: a recent study, by German and Swedish researchers, of 20,000 people, calls that traditional wisdom into question. This was no flash-in-the-pan study but an eight-and-a-half-year period involving 7,876 men and 12,749 women. And, expected, they learned …

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You Say Goodbye, I say Hello

This Christmas I had the great fortune of visiting Guatemala. I really enjoyed answering the question, “Why did you decide to come to Guatemala?” which I was asked by locals more than I had expected. I always answered that Guatemala was the centre of the Mayan civilization and that I wanted to have front row …

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‘Moving the Coat Rack’

We heard a story a while back about an artist who had a sculpture exhibit going on at a gallery. Near the entry door to the gallery, the artist placed a coat rack. During the opening, people would come into the gallery, hang their coat on the rack and move on to check out the …

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Belgian Street-Meat Heaven

Mitraillette: it’s the world’s most perfect food. Without a description of its component parts you may mistake this culinary art form for a simple hot-dog covered in French fries. Trust me when I say this is well beyond your common hot-dog doused in chips and ketchup. A mitraillette is started with a baguette. Nobody can …

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Quest for Fire

That is your favourite time at the fire? What makes the campfire the best place in world for you? Perhaps I am being a bit presumptuous in assuming that the fire holds the same allure for you as it does for me … but it does, doesn’t it? Is it the Moment of Ignition? Watching …

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Mosquiticide

Everything in nature has a purpose. The purpose of the Noble Mosquito [Culiseta longiareolata] is to keep our campsites from becoming overcrowded. What I see as a minor annoyance in the overall experience of camping, those with a weaker constitution – or with less-developed mosquito-minimization strategies – succumb to like Kleenex on a campfire. And …

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Finding the Cure

Nature Deficit Disorder. Really? An official term for spending too much time not camping! The Yukon has your cure. Prescription strength!

Mambo Tanzania: Pt. 3

I made it! I climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro! I’m sure I cost a few of the resort staff some betting money by doing it. When I told Gilian, the receptionist, she laughed at me. “You’re kidding, right?” I had approached the hike without any thoughts of success or failure riding on it… just eight days in …

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Mambo Tanzania: Pt. 2

Mambo! Poa! Last week I explained Mambo. Poa is the proper response. Described to me as: Mambo = What’s Up? Poa = It’s cool. At the end of our visit to Tanzania, we had an opportunity to visit a local orphanage our Canadian trip organizers and our Moshi-based guiding company were involved in supporting only …

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Mambo Tanzania: Pt. 1

Editor’s Note: What’s Up Yukon co-publisher Mark Beese recently embarked on the adventure of a lifetime—an assault on Tanzania’s fabled Mount Kilimanjaro. This is the first of three articles about his adventure. Mambo! That’s not true Swahili. “Jambo” is the informal Swahili greeting equivalent to “hello”. Mambo… well, that’s the colloquial greeting that most closely …

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Creature Comforts

Family camping is like the third evolution of camping (after being taken out to Algonquin Park with my parents) … at least it is for me anyways. My first evolution of camping involved figuring out how to fit the maximum amount of beer and people in the Tercel. Comfort wasn’t an issue, I wasn’t going …

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Beer Can Be Eaten

For the most part, this column is used to keep folks abreast of contemporary beer issues and educate Yukoners in craft brewing culture. Often times, it reads as a “news of the weird in beer” type article … a defence of crazy beer happenings the world over. Today, we explore beer’s practicality in an effort …

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Demand Your Officeless Office-

I see the office building being replaced by the virtual office and I see this happening over this generation. – Mark Beese, 2008

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