Today is Christmas, in our home we don’t really get into the holiday that much, but we do enjoy spending time together. I made one of my daughter’s favorite dishes; dhal, stir fry veggies and… chapati and I made soap! It’s been a few weeks since I’ve made soap, so I was really excited about preparing this soap loaf. During my “time off” of soapmaking I have made body butters and lip balms. I’ll have to write and post pictures of what I created.
A few days ago, I poured three bottles of Guinness draught stout in a Mason jar
and set it aside so it could go flat. Well… after 1.5 days it still wasn’t flat! There was still plenty of carbonation in the beer. I’ve read many reports not to use the beer that hasn’t gone flat because it could cause an explosion when lye is added to the mix. Hmm, since I didn’t want to wait any longer and, I felt that I could live with an eruption (if handled carefully) this morning, I went on and divided the beer into ziplock baggies and placed into my freezer and let it stay there until it becomes solid. Afterwards, I placed the frozen beer into my soap mixing bowl and slooowwllly added the lye. Guess what? No volcano! Of course, this doesn’t mean I can do this with every beer and… even though the soap wasn’t flat, I imagine it wasn’t as fresh as a newly cracked open beer.
Late this morning, I combined all my oils (liquid and solids) in a large stockpot and turned the burner on low to melt the solid oils. Thie evening, I finally got around to combining the ingredients together and making my beer soap. Because the oils had set several hours their temperature was about 91F and the lye water, after the lye had dissolved into the beer, was 81F. I used one of my favorite recipes and simply tweaked it with the addition of beer and egg yolk.
I’m eager to sample this soap once it cures. Since I’m working on a much-loved recipe, I can only imagine that the addition of the beer and egg yolk will simply enhance the soap. From my research, the addition of beer produces a rich lather. We’ll see, most of my soapmaking recipes already do that and so I’m curious to see if there are any noticeable changes. The addition of egg yolk supposedly adds a creamy texture, again something I do see in some of my soaps but adding these ingredients might mean I can use them in place of others when I’m experimenting with new recipes. I can’t wait to cut this soap. Hopefully, it’ll be ready tomorrow.
A fun test will be to try this again with freshly frozen beer to see what happens. No, I wouldn’t recommend this to anyone to do, but I’ll definitely try it out. I’ll make sure I do my mixing outside.
Wishing those who celebrate it, a very Merry Christmas!