I've never been a huge beer fan until the day I had my first beer flight at HopSaint. HopSaint is a local craft brewery putting out award winning beer and great food. Everything they do is right, it's all about freshness, flavor and community https://www.hopsaint.com/our-story. I had a plan to make soap with beer, I had never done it and understood it helps add lather and bubbles to soap. I know beer has some really beneficial ingredients so I grabbed a few crowlers, a Pale Ale called Pure Intention as well as a beautiful Porter called Chocolate Trip and got down to business.
I had to prepare the beer before introducing it to sodium hydroxide (lye) to avoid serious mishaps. Beer contains a good amount of sugar which when mixed with with lye becomes very hot. Alcohol and saponification don't mix well and neither does carbonation. First I had to cook down the beer to burn off the alcohol and make it flat. I reduced 32oz exactly in half to 16oz. Then poured my flat beer into ice cube trays to freeze them.
Once frozen I weighed out my beer cubes, I needed 14oz of each for the soap recipes I chose.
You can see the color difference, the dark Porter on the left and Pale Ale on the right.
Time to get everything prepped, included here is my 14oz of frozen Chocolate Trip (sans alcohol and carbonation), all of my other oils and butters melted, Fun colors I've seen at HopSaint, and some Ouhd Wood fragrance.
Slowly I added my lye to the cubes and it melted them down to a temperature of 99 degrees Fahrenheit. I had my oils sitting at approximately the same temperature so it was time to introduce them!
Beer - lye mixed with oils, Wow, this color was SOOO rich and luxurious!
And I followed the same process for the Pure Intention Pale Ale but used different colors and fragrance.
And VOILA! A few days later...
Freshly cut and ready to cure.