Make Cranberry Frost Beer Soap With Me
The beer for this batch has been sitting in my freezer for a few weeks, which is usually where people are first surprised. They picture me pouring a fresh, cold brew straight into the pot or mixing in the leftover grain mash from breweries. That's not how it goes.
Before any soap gets made, I boil the beer on the stove. This removes the alcohol and carbonation. Removing the carbonation helps make the beer easier to process. The alcohol is good to remove because it would dry out your skin and work against everything else I'm putting in the bar.
Once it's boiled flat and cooled, I portion it into the freezer. I do this in batches so there's always some ready when I need to restock on soap. Keeping it cold not only preserves it, but helps me out when mixing it with the lye. Lye generates a lot of heat when it meets liquid, enough that the whole thing can climb the sides of the container and boil over if you're not careful. Frozen beer soaks up that heat instead.
Melting the oils
Once the cold beer is prepped, I can start measuring the oils. Out comes the big stock pot, on goes the tabletop burner, and all the different oils and butters slowly melt down together.
Every recipe I formulate is slightly different depending on what I want the bar to do. Some oils make the bar harder so it lasts longer in your shower. Some add a bit of shine. Others are there purely to moisturize and condition. A lot of them pull double duty, which is why shea butter is one of my favorites. It softens and moisturizes skin and, because it's solid at room temperature, it also firms up the finished bar. Coconut oil and olive oil are usually in the mix too, along with a few others depending on the recipe.
I get all of that melting and then go combine the chilled beer and lye.
A word about lye
I get asked about this frequently, so let me just address it. Many people are under the impression that modern soap doesn't use lye or that lye is dangerous and something to avoid.
You cannot make real soap without lye. The chemistry of the process just requires it. Soap is what you get when a base reacts with an acid. Lye is that base and the fats/butters are the acid. That reaction is the whole thing. There's no version of soap making that skips it. That said, there's plenty of phony synthetic detergent bars on the market that are marketed as soap. But I digress...
The part that puts people at ease is that the lye isn't left by the end. By the time the process finishes, the lye has been completely used up and turned into soap. So there's nothing left in the bar to irritate your skin.
So I mix the lye into the chilled beer until it dissolves and pour that into the melted oils. I have a mixer set up to keep this combo stirring the entire time it cooks. This makes sure that all the ingredients are distributed evenly.
The clay
While that's going, I mix up my clay. The cool thing about this clay is that it does three things at once for the soap. It's what gives Cranberry Frost its pink color, so there's no dye involved. It adds a light exfoliation, and it pulls excess oil off your skin.
I dissolve the clay powder in distilled water before it goes in the pot. Adding it dry leaves you picking clumps out of the batter later.
Cooking it down
From here it's all about steady heat, stirring, and patience. This is hot process soap making which means the reaction happens in the pot rather than slowly in the mold over several weeks.
The batter changes texture as it goes. It starts very thin then slowly begins to thicken up. Eventually the texture starts to look like mashed potatoes - thick and glossy and holding its shape. That's usually the sign it's done. I check the pH to be sure the lye is completely used up before preparing for the next step.
This is the fun part - we finally get to add the scent and the poppy seeds. The seeds look great, giving a whimsical speckled look to the finished bar soaps. They also give a coarser scrub than the clay does on its own which feels really good if your skin is itchy and dry.
Then we wait
I pour the batter into long, rectangular molds and set the molds on the shelf. After a day or two the batter is firm enough to pop out as one long brick which I then cut into bars.
The bars of soap all go back on the shelf to cure for a week or two. It looks like nothing's happening, but the bars are slowly losing water that whole time. The more dehydrated the bars get, the harder and denser they become. A bar that hasn't cured long enough turns mushy when you use it and doesn't last. The longer they sit, the better they get.
When they're hard enough, I label them and they're ready to sell! Want to try Cranberry Frost Beer Soap for yourself? Find it here!
Cheers, Elaine
