[00:02] - Today we're shutting off some of our vices. - Boom. Greg: Fast fashion. Boys, do what you want with my body.
[00:15] Ah! We stealing. - to make our off-grid beer.  - Oh, look at that.
[00:28] I'm gonna take on the fast fashion industry. Science is cool. and it's not just our sexy good looks.
[00:42] Mitch:  So we're taking our passion for the environment Greg:  We are going off the grid.
[00:54] Mitch: One by one, we'll shut off our basic necessities. Greg:  And with help from our team, we will use science... Yes! It works!
[01:08] Mitch and Greg:  This is "Shut It Off Asap!" because we are officially shutting off our vices, like alcohol.
[01:24] Or wifi! Also known as "wee-fee." I'm addicted to this stuff. which is shopping online for fast fashion. A gay guy once told me that swim briefs were single use, and I bought three neon ones!
[01:36] We wanna explore the connection of these vices to the climate crisis Cheers. I'm gonna culture our own microbes to ultimately make a unique beer.
[01:52] by sheering a sheep I can actually see out of this window, with natural dyes found from plants around this farm. In the end, I'm gonna make something like this.
[02:08] which we need to survive and to finish this episode. does have internet and has a wifi signal,
[02:20] Greg: Sometimes we forget that wifi use In fact, watching online video results in 0.4 kg of CO2 released per hour,
[02:32] adding up to 1.3 billion kgs of CO2 per year. that use fossil fuels for energy, as they get really hot.
[02:45] to use only renewable energy for their servers to decrease the need for cooling. and now build their hot, hot servers in Iceland.
[02:59] The farmhouse wifi is connected to the Internet via radio waves. old-time technology that we still use today. Most of our devices, like cell phones, tablets, and laptops,
[03:11] use omnidirectional antennas to pick up wifi signals. and communicate with your internet, So I'm gonna make a cantenna
[03:24] I'll build a large reflective dish and the parabolic curvature will focus them towards a can. which acts like the antenna in your phone.
[03:38] which is a unidirectional antenna When the wifi signal from the farm reaches my antenna, A reflector at the back and five directors
[03:54] which ultimately sends an electronic signal to the dongle and then to the laptop. the different sized copper plates for my Yagi,
[04:09] Greg is building the frame for his parabolic dish. that will hold the cantenna in the center of the parabolic dish. and will collect the radio waves
[04:24] and send them to that little copper wire in the can. will get excited by the farm's focused wifi radio waves and into a dongle.
[04:39] into digital data which our computer uses as wifi. Mitch:  The Yagi antenna I'm building also uses copper with the wifi's electromagnetic waves.
[04:54] to get a much stronger signal based on its dimensions, but its downfall is that it has to be pointed perfectly
[05:07] because its focused beam is so narrow. but if we get the Yagi wrong, I think this is one of the coolest builds that we've done.
[05:23] the perfect place to put this monster. The vice that I'm most addicted to sadly is wifi. Hands up. You got me, Mitch.
[05:39] to do the work that's necessary for this show. You sometimes forget how much internet is integrated into your life until you don't have it.
[05:52] Greg: Mitch and I have been having one to two beers a night to relax. which is gonna be harder than usual. I've been doing a bunch of research
[06:05] Now not the warts that you get on your body. And it's basically a mix But the most important ingredient we need is yeast.
[06:19] Humanity's existence is profoundly intertwined with yeast. and it floats in the air that we breathe. has made it a key building block
[06:32] to a domesticated agricultural society. we're looking for something called brewer's yeast, If we find yeast samples,
[06:46] ( alarm blaring ) to hopefully have yeast on them. - Just doing some science. - Wa-pah!
[07:03] Aw, gross. What a freak. Greg: I think it's gonna be one of my skins. I think the butt crack will show the most growth,
[07:18] If we can make beer out of the butt crack, we're gonna be rich. ( cash register dings ) but we also have some wort samples
[07:32] We have this bit of cheese cloth on top so the yeast can get through, And the hope is that near fruit and near flowers, and be able to cultivate that and use it for our beer.
[07:48] so we'll leave the wort out overnight to capture the yeast. - Look what I got. - Ooh. Thank you. then added it directly into a wort bottle
[08:04] in order to take advantage of the natural yeast on its skin. to see if we have enough yeast growth to use for brewing our beer.
[08:19] first I'm going to need the wool. So I'm here with Rachel who's gonna teach me how to shear a sheep with this! - I trust you absolutely. - Okay.
[08:31] We are gonna be taking the fleece off of a sheep with a razor. you'll see how much wool comes off, so that's what I keep thinking.
[08:46] I think we should just get started and then, you know, knit it into a swim brief. - ( bleats ) - She just said, "I can't wait."
[09:02] - Once or twice. - Oh, my God, it's, like, - Ready? - I'm ready. I just don't wanna cut them. I don't wanna cut them.
[09:17] Oh, my God. but a lot of our clothes are made with synthetic fibers like polyester, For example, one 6 kg load of laundry
[09:34] releases more than 700,000 microplastic fibers into waste water, produces the equivalent of 50 billion plastic bottles All the way out with that leg again.
[09:47] My hands feel amazing. I haven't washed them because lanolin is an oil and shearing them, and it's good for your hands. Baby, do you feel naked and like a newborn?
[10:02] Thank you so much. I never thought I'd do something like this. selling that wool doesn't even pay for me to come shear the sheep. Wouldn't that be a good thing, Canadian wool? I don't know.
[10:17] There are smaller producers that do have wool sheep, - Greg: Like making clothing?  - Rachel: Exactly.
[10:29] we need to get it into yarn that I contextualize knitting into a swim brief. It's really hard to have a strong opinion about responsible production 85% of textiles end up in landfills each year,
[10:45] being dumped in a landfill every second. are constantly trying to make us buy new things, honestly, second-hand shopping is incredible,
[10:59] and you kinda carve out a little style for yourself. I am keen to try my Yagi first. so that's why we brought them up here.
[11:14] a type of electromagnetic radiation. and they'll induce an electric current in our copper antennas, Let's see, as I slowly lift it up towards the farm.
[11:34] Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Greg: Oh, my gosh. - It works! Wow. - We have full internet
[11:50] - Oh, that's crazy! - That's really cool. I mean, It's not literally a laser beam. Because I don't want to be out here holding this all the time,
[12:04] - and then we can leave it. - Okay, okay, now we do mine. Now we do mine. my parabolic dish has a huge surface area so it's a bit more forgiving when it comes to the placement.
[12:18] Okay, it's starting. Give me a sec. We need five seconds. Oh, my God.
[12:30] - This is crazy. - Okay, we literally have streaming video. We can just run these wires into our cabin, continues to pay their internet bill.
[12:45] - We stealing. - True. Now it's time to get an expert opinion. It's got sediment in the bottom, which looks like yeast.
[13:00] Woohoo! but someone needs to wash their feet. The sorts of bacteria that you don't want are very obvious.
[13:17] that's a sign you don't want to use it. the only one I think I would wanna try You have a nice round brownish colored colony.
[13:31] Mitch:  Based on Bryan's advice, and re-streaking it onto a new agar plate so that it can grow free from any other contaminants.
[13:45] Now I'm gonna choose which one I'll actually use to make beer. ( drum roll )
[13:59] We know that fruit often attract yeast towards them, that we have might have true brewer's yeast in here.
[14:11] the site of a local wool processing mill where it is cleaned and left out to dry for 24 hours. a machine that separates the wool,
[14:25] opening it up to prepare it to be carded. so it can be spun into yarn. into a braid-like form.
[14:39] has overlapping scales of protein. which is what makes wool so strong. and voilà.
[14:52] It's now yarn ready to be knit into my swim brief. off of that poor sheep to make swim brief. So I am here with Jamie and Christopher of Cabin Boy Knits,
[15:06] who are gonna help me dye this au natural. depending on what literal foliage we have leaves that were picked from a lilac tree.
[15:20] And it makes a fantastic color. It is yellow. We call it urine. For example, all denim was dyed with the indigo plant.
[15:36] is dyed with synthetic indigo and other chemicals like formaldehyde, The chemical aniline is a carcinogen
[15:50] And the industries using this dye and the other 1/3 is absorbed into our jeans. And in one, we've got a container of bugs.
[16:07] Dye from cochineal bugs while dye from lac insects dates back hundreds of years to ancient India, where it used to color wool and silk.
[16:22] humans have been eating insects and using them for dye and I've always loved and wanted to be a witch. I love that rich bloody purple.
[16:39] between the dyeing of clothes and some natural alternatives. The process of dyeing our clothes uses the equivalent of two million Olympic-sized swimming pools of water each year,
[16:52] with the fashion industry being responsible for 20% of all water pollution. Clothing companies use these chemical dyes because they're cheaper. is endangering our health and destroying our planet.
[17:05] I put it in rhubarb leaves. is done because rhubarb acts as a mordant, to adhere to the wool and not wash off.
[17:19] Gonna increase the surface area to volume ratio let the fibers breathe, per say, in thine wa-wa. Oh, I'm so excited.
[17:35] Not only is the beginning a huge amount of work, once we have our yeast. is saccharomyces cerevisiae,
[17:50] and baking since ancient times, and is sometimes considered Once the yeast is inside of the wort, and in the process release carbon dioxide
[18:05] After the all the sugar in the wort is consumed, die off or go dormant who's gonna teach me how to brew our beer.
[18:19] that we can feed to the yeast. We're gonna use dry malt extract and specialty malts. but decided to bring them in to save time.
[18:33] The brewing process would seem kind of simple. Let's see how we're doing. A lot of aroma coming out of there. - Wow. - Go ahead and throw the bittering hops in.
[18:47] It just smells like beer. That's so cool. We let the brew boil for an hour before adding more hops. Next step is add aroma hops to the beer.
[19:00] so that it's ready for us to add the brewer's yeast. The thing that's really sticking out to me is the smells. and I never really understood what that smell was,
[19:13] what ingredients are bringing out those aromas, and it's making me like brewing and beer a lot more. Greg has given us full creative control to run with this thing.
[19:27] So we're gonna need to take some measurements. Don't mind my hand. Are you runner by any chance? 23 1/2 inches.
[19:41] 34 3/4. How do we do that? Guys, buy me a drink next time.
[19:56] We're all on the same team, so I felt very comfortable. Our wort has cooled down, Absolutely.
[20:11] has been converted by natural enzymes into sugar. ...which will feed on that sugar. The byproducts will be carbon dioxide--
[20:26] - So this is plum. - Go right ahead. And on the bottom we can see a little bit of-- Cam: A little bit of biomass down there. Yep, definitely.
[20:41] your nose should lead you every step of the way. If it smells bad, the wort will make bad tasting beer. - Yeah, smells like wort. - Okay, great.
[20:53] will bring different flavors to the beer. Essentially, it's gonna let pressure out of the bottle - Yeah. Exactly. - Onto garden.
[21:09] We thought, yeast near fruit, likelihood higher. - No funk, which is generally what you want. - Cool, okay. That's the first sign of an actual fermentation.
[21:23] We have all our wort with all our three samples, Now we wait? Just keep the UV light off of them.
[21:37] Come on, lilacs. Give me the yellow I need for my swim brief. I thought, "Oh, the green leaves, that's green."
[21:49] We're gonna add a little bit of alum to it, Greg: Alum is a mineral that acts as a mordant while also giving the color added vibrancy.
[22:03] Come to my nether regions. Yes. Oh. Oh, wow.
[22:16] - Good job. - Into my deep violet. Oh, you can already see it dyeing. Oh, that's so satisfying. We're gonna let them steep and brew, some might say, for 20 minutes.
[22:32] So this whole experiment for me is honestly just so exciting, just to make one teensy little garment. I can't wait to see how it looks.
[22:47] I can't believe green lilac made that yellow. Ooh, look at that gorgeous deep maroon. Thank you so much for naturally dying my swim brief.
[23:08] Holy shit. It literally smells like beer. whether or not these drinks will be safe. Like, at the end of this, if we can test not only the pH of the final brew,
[23:26] and if those metrics are right, even if it means it won't necessarily have the best taste, All the beers tested safely,
[23:41] so now we can bottle them up. All right, we have our final brewed beers. to let these brew, but we were thirsty for some brewskis.
[23:54] And we're gonna do a little taste test now. and our local yeast. - Yes. - Okay. Oh, do you hear that carbonation?
[24:07] - Ooh. - Okay, cheers. It tastes like the beers you spend, like, Next up, we will do our plum.
[24:23] Oh, the fizz! Our last beer is our local yeast. Ooh!
[24:36] It tastes like a light iced tea. - One, two, three. - Garden!
[24:49] It is one of the most delicious beers I've ever had. and it's the least dank. I'm so proud of you. I'm so happy that we now can drink again.
[25:03] I'm honestly feeling tipsy, I cannot promise you that.
[25:15] my teensy-weenie wool swim briefs. I'm ready to see it. I'm a little nervous. That's actually pretty cute.
[25:30] That's very impressive. you processed it, all that, and now you wear it-- - Oh, my gosh. - Who knew?
[25:43] That's incredible, Greg. I'm kind of happy I got the one of a kind. Ah! Stop! They really love these boots.
[25:57] Okay, see? This is kind of challenging. Okay, okay. ( shrieks )