Creative Soapmaking - October (Beer and Wine Soaps, Experimenting and Developing Recipes) (2024)

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Beer and Wine in Soapmaking—Why?

October is a harvest month, of course, and is also the month of Oktoberfest, a traditional celebration of the brewer's art in Germany.

Beer and wine have been increasingly popular for soap. As far as I can tell, that's a modern development. As fascinated as I am with antique soap advertisem*nts, I've never run across one for beer or wine soap.

The sugars and carbs in beer and wine make good lather. Also, beer and wine soap may sell very well in some markets.

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Experimenting—Why?

I'm probably the only on-call soapmaking author. Anyone can find me from my books or my web page. I answer email pretty quickly, too, so word gets around.

And I get calls for help—almost never, I'm proud to say, from readers who have closely followed the directions in my books. But soapmakers are creative people—they want to branch out, try something new, something that's their own.

So far, great. But the emails that make my heart sink are the ones where someone has had a large or disastrous failure. They've made ten pounds of soap, and it didn't set. Or it boiled over. Or it was just bad soap. Something that seemed like a good idea didn't turn out so well.

Sometimes, people ask ahead of time. This makes me happy. If I can point out things that will cause problems before someone commits time, money, and love to that project, and suggest modifications that will make it work, that makes my day.

This month gives a lot of attention to experimenting, and to developing something of your own in a methodical way that will work.

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Using Alcoholic Beverages in Soapmaking

If you freeze the liquid, you don't have to add the lye as slowly as if you use it without freezing. If you don't freeze it, you have to trickle the lye into it a few grains at a time, or it's likely to erupt in a "volcano"—and even if not, it may overheat and boil over at the end anyway. With frozen liquid, you can add the lye fairly quickly. Some soapmakers don't freeze beer and wine, but it's safer to do it, and you avoid scorching.

Some soapmakers remove the alcohol from wine and beer because they don't want alcohol in their soap. They consider it drying. This may be true—I haven't found it to be a problem, but I encourage you to experiment and see what you think. See suggestions below for experimenting and developing recipes.

Wine may freeze unevenly, with the water content of the wine becoming more solid than the rest. Since I freeze liquids in ice cube trays, I don't worry about this—I'll get the whole thing even if it separates somewhat. Beer freezes well, even if it's not cooked to remove the alcohol. For wine, this may depend somewhat on the alcohol content. With the 12% alcohol table wines I tried, I didn't see a problem with freezing, and I have an ordinary refrigerator-freezer, nothing special.

Alcohol-free wine and beer are available, or you can simmer the wine or beer for about ten minutes to remove the alcohol. If you know a home brewer, you can buy unfermented beer—and possibly also find a customer for your soap! You may find home brewers by searching online for home brew clubs in your area. Unfermented beer would have neither alcohol nor carbonation—excellent for soapmaking.

You must flatten any carbonated liquid you use for soapmaking, regardless of whether you freeze it. To flatten beer or sparkling wine, pour it into a container that leaves as much surface area as possible open to the air. Let it sit at room temperature for a day. Whipping it with a whisk may speed things up. Carbonation may also be removed by adding a pinch of baking powder, salt, sugar, or almost any other granular substance that you're willing to have in your soap. The liquid will foam up vigorously, then go flat.

Don't leave your beer or wine at room temperature for too long, or it will mold. Even covered, it picks up enough mold spores from somewhere—or maybe they're already there—to develop some impressive fungi. (Maybe I should have photographed my spectacular collection, but it was rather disgusting, and I decided to spare you.) Either cook it, flatten it with sugar or another granular ingredient, or just don't let it sit so long.

Lye dissolves a little more slowly in wine and beer than it does in water.

If you're sensitive to the ammonia-like fumes of milk soapmaking, be aware you may have the same reaction when beer or wine is the soapmaking liquid.

Beer and wine soap don't really retain the odor of the liquids. But they're not odorless, and the odor won't necessarily complement all fragrances. I avoid florals, in favor of wood, musk, or herbal scents. Of course, there are beer and wine fragrances as well, if that's what you want.

Overall, I preferred the beer soaps I made to the wine ones. My fear that the beer soap would smell like beer and leave me smelling like beer was unfounded. The beer soaps I made were quite good soap. I thought the wine soaps were more run-of-the-mill. I don't think wine hurts soap, particularly. But it did seem that beer helped it.

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Basic Beer Soap and Variations

Victorian trade card showcasing Germany and German beer

9 ounces (255 grams) lard

4.5 ounces (128 grams) coconut oil

6 ounces (171 grams) grapeseed oil

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10.5 ounces (298 grams) olive oil

9 ounces (255 grams) beer

2 teaspoons sugar

4.0 ounces (116 grams) lye

1. Combine the beer and the sugar. Stir until the beer stops foaming.

2. Let sit for a few hours or overnight. Freeze.

3. Melt the coconut oil and lard. Add to the grapeseed oil and olive oil.

4. If you're using a fragrance, add it to the oils.

5. Combine the lye with the frozen beer. Stir until the beer is melted and the lye is dissolved.

6. Add to the oil mixture. Proceed as for any cold process soap.

Two beer soaps. Color variations are caused by different fragrance oils. The lighter one is the basic recipe; the darker is the All-Veg Beer Soap, given below.

Chocolate Ale Variation

Use ale for the liquid instead of beer. Remove the carbonation by adding 1tablespoon of cocoa powder in addition to the sugar. Strain, freeze, and continue as for the basic recipe. Or instead of the sugar, add 1 to 1½ tablespoons of honey to the lard and coconut oil before heating. When it's all melted together, add to the liquid fats and stick blend to make sure the honey is well mixed.

Chocolate Ale Soap. The cocoa gives a speckled color, but not a grainy texture.

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All-Veg Beer Soap

You don't need to use lard to make a great beer soap. Here's a recipe with all vegetable fats.

10.5 ounces (298 grams) sunflower oil

10.5 ounces (298 grams) olive oil

9 ounces (255 grams) coconut oil

9 ounces (255 grams) flat beer, frozen

4.2 ounces (121 grams) lye

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Trying Wine in Soapmaking

Vintage wine label, 1930s

One of my most helpful hints is to try almost anything you want—in a two-bar batch. If you don't like it, you haven't lost much. If you do, scale it up. Here's a description of the process I used to formulate a wine soap.

I started by searching online for other people's experiences, and asking friends what they'd done with wine soap. My online search yielded a lot of opinions. I read many descriptions of instant trace and bad odors. Discussions of the color of red wine soap included descriptions ranging from red, pink, or other red shades, to beige, to gray.

Wine, of course, exists in many forms—soapmaking results may well have varied depending on the type used. I assumed that most soapmakers would be looking for inexpensive dry wine—not fine table wine, but not rotgut, either. I used inexpensive cabernet sauvignon and chardonnay—the kind of wine a restaurant might serve in carafes. The alcohol content of both was 12%. Sweet or fortified wines might get completely different results.

I strongly prefer freezing any liquid ingredients other than water—plus, I'd run into opinions that it's not possible to freeze wine without removing most or all of the alcohol. So, I cooked a large bottle of red wine to remove the alcohol and then froze the wine.

It worked in my soap, but I learned that removing the alcohol isn't important if you do freeze the wine—and that wine that contains alcohol will freeze.

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Wine Soap Experiments and Recipes

The picture I've provided here below each recipe shows soap that was made with that recipe plus the wine it was made from. All the pictures were taken in the same location, and I've tried to standardize color to allow comparison.

Wine Soap #1

15 ounces (425 grams) grapeseed oil

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6 ounces (171 grams) olive oil

9 ounces (255 grams) coconut oil

9 ounces (255 grams) dealcoholized, frozen red wine

4.1 ounces (118 grams) lye

My red wine had been reduced by 50% by simmering in a slow cooker for several hours. I used a red wine fragrance but didn't think the scent resembled red wine particularly—more like Concord grape juice. Trace was about average, possibly a little slow.

If I'd been aiming for a red color, I would have been disappointed—the color was tan, nearly caramel. I wondered if a less green oil mixture might have minimized the drift into the brown color range in the finished soap. So I developed a second recipe with very pale fats.

Wine Soap #2

9.9 ounces (281 grams) almond oil

10.2 ounces (289 grams) avocado butter

9.9 ounces (281 grams) coconut oil

9 ounces (255 grams) dealcoholized, frozen red wine

4.3 ounces (123 grams) lye

The soap remained a dull reddish color for about fifteen minutes after pouring, then changed to approximately the same color as the previous batch. An apparent failure of my idea that paler oils would solve the problem—but overnight, it faded to a pale beige with a slight pinkish cast. Still not red, but light enough that coloring or marbling with color would work.

You could go on with experiments like this—use red wine cut 50-50 with water. Use rosé wine. Or, unless you or your client definitely wants red wine in the soap, use white. Try cutting the wine 50-50 with milk. Or with coconut milk—that's whiter than dairy milk. You can lighten color with titanium dioxide, but it cuts lather, so I don't.

Also, you could skip the step that concentrates the wine—cooking the alcohol off. I found contradictory opinions when I asked around and read advice online. Some said dealcoholizing is necessary, some said it isn't. So, my next question was: What happens if you don't cook off the alcohol from the wine?

Wine Soap #3

I continued with the same recipe as for Wine Soap #1, but substituting white wine that had been frozen but not dealcoholized. I used white wine for a somewhat arbitrary, but practical, reason—I had cooked all the red. The alcohol content was the same. I could have bought more of the same type of red wine, but just for finding out if alcohol was a deal breaker in soapmaking, I saw no reason to do that.

The first question was whether full-alcohol wine would freeze at all. This turned out to be no problem, at least when doing it in ice cube trays.

The second question was whether the alcohol would accelerate trace. The soap in this experiment traced much more quickly than in the previous batches. It wasn't impossible to handle, though—just fast. Online accounts of instant trace may have referred to batches where the wine wasn't frozen, or where the wine had more sugar than the chardonnay I used. I'd say the same about reports that alcohol makes soap erupt in a "volcano," since there was no tendency to do that at all with frozen wine—the "volcano" soap must have been made with liquid wine.

My conclusion was that alcohol didn't accelerate trace to an unmanageable extent, but it did seem to accelerate. (For August, I discuss a number of ways to deal with accelerants.) I discussed this with a friend who has made many more batches of wine soap than I have. She says fast trace has been no problem at all for her, and she chalks that up to using oils that trace slowly, and to having considerable experience with wine soap. (She also uses the wine frozen.)

So, it's a possibility you might plan for in your experiments. Be ready to deal with fairly quick trace if it happens, but don't worry excessively about it.

I'd say dealcoholizing could serve a purpose, but it is optional. If your scent or base oils tend to accelerate, you might be well advised to remove from the picture any possible accelerating effect of alcohol. Otherwise, just have your molds ready and pay attention.

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What Would I Do?

If I were making wine soap for sale, I'd experiment more to see whether removing alcohol makes a more emollient soap.

For wine soap, I'd use oils that would contribute as little as possible to color. For red wine soap, I'd use a natural or artificial colorant to get the red wine shade. I think buyers will expect the color to be similar to that of the wine, and I didn't find wine itself to be capable of producing a red color.

I'd also use a wine fragrance if I were making wine soap for sale.

Beer soap is far nicer than I imagined when I began these experiments. I'd probably test a few fragrances before I settled on one or two—a beer or ale fragrance? Spicy? Musky?

I might try beer as a liquid with 100% coconut oil soap superfatted at 20%. I'd expect some impressive lather with that one.

Of the various granular ingredients I used to flatten the beer, I preferred sugar.

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Developing Your Own Recipes

I've made many kinds of soap, but when readers first asked about beer and wine soaps, I had no idea how to make them. With this project, then, it seemed a good time to go into the general way I learn about new kinds of soapmaking, and how I develop recipes—a subject I've always wanted to discuss.

It helps if you have experience with other people's soap recipes before you try inventing one. If you don't, you can still develop your own recipes, but be ready to practice a little patience.

Choosing Ingredients

When talking about lye calculators below, I discuss some of the practical issues in choosing fats. Besides those, though, there are esthetic decisions to make.

Almost all unrefined fats, and some specialty liquids, have an odor of their own. It's not usually a bad odor, though, and in many cases, it wears off as the soap cures. In my experience, unrefined shea butter, hemp oil, cocoa butter, neem oil, and wheat germ oil have odors of their own, as do all milk products, beer, wine, fruit juices, and many other liquids. With unrefined fats, it's probably best to assume there's some odor.

Color may be a consideration as well, especially with unrefined oils. Any natural or artificial colorant will have its color altered by the colors of oils in the soap, as well as by the color of any fragrance or essential oil. On the other hand, the colors of oils may not be the sole other source of a soap's final color, as we saw in the wine soap experiments above—liquids, including fragrances and water substitutes, contribute color, too.

When you choose olive oil, go by price. Cheapest is usually best for soapmaking. Cheaper olive oil has less flavor—which also means less odor. It also may be more acidic, which would promote saponification. I have not found pomace olive oil to be any better for soapmaking than ordinary olive oil. It used to be cheaper, but that has changed in many places, as demand has increased. If you want to minimize the green color, "light" olive oil or "Refined A" olive oil might be worth the extra cost—but I have yet to find an olive oil that's truly colorless.

You should test small batches before deciding to use a product in quantity. And give the soap a chance to cure before deciding. (Unrefined wheat germ oil, which smells like vitamin pills when fresh, completely loses its scent in a couple of weeks.)

If a fat or liquid retains some odor, you can choose a fragrance to complement it. For the most part, fat odors tend toward nutty, so a woody or musky fragrance would be a good pick. That also works well for beer and wine soap, and of course, there are ale, beer, and wine fragrances that enhance the natural scent, if that's what you want.

Using a Lye Calculator

You definitely need a good lye calculator. There is absolutely nothing difficult about using one. You enter your oil ingredients, and the calculator figures the lye and liquid. I've known aspiring soapmakers who were terribly put off and intimidated by the name, but lye calculators are a soapmaker's best friend.

I use SoapCalc. Take some time and read the information pages on the web site—there's a lot of good material there.

SoapCalc has the steps numbered in order, so you just follow along, one step at a time. Along the way, you can change its defaults to suit your technique. This is easy to do—just type in the values you want. I change the default value for "Water as % of oils" from 38% to 30%. If my liquid is water or milk, I use 8% superfatting rather than the default 5%. Otherwise, I stick with the superfatting default—when I haven't, I've gotten soaps that were too soft.

Next, you'll plug in the fats you plan to use, and the percentages you're considering. Unless you're making a single-oil soap, you're looking for a good blend.

Then you click on "Calculate Recipe" and get your results. You also get a "snapshot" of your finished soap, telling you what its properties will be. Here's an explanation of the properties and numbers you'll see.

Hardness—You want your soap hard enough that it unmolds and doesn't disappear quickly in use, but not so hard that it feels like a pebble when you try to wash with it. As a rule of thumb, a soap should contain one-third to two-thirds hard fats—fats with melting points above normal room temperature. At least one-third hard fats will almost always give you a soap that's in the normal range for hardness. If you want shaving soap, though, you might do better with a hardness value that's below the optimum range SoapCalc suggests. And in my book Smart Soapmaking, I have one recipe that contains 100% hard fats!

Cleansing—The cleansing number tells you how well the soap cleans. If your soap will be used for washing a mechanic's greasy hands, you want a fairly high cleansing number, maybe out of range. Facial soap for dry skin? Go in the other direction.

Conditioning—This measures how emollient the soap is. It's pretty much a matter of taste and use, so it's subjective. A soap with a high conditioning number will leave your skin feeling like you've used a light lotion—though you may not be satisfied with the cleansing. Quite a few fats, particularly solid ones, have good conditioning value—but if acne is a consideration, find out if a conditioning oil is comedogenic (acne-causing) before using it in a facial soap. (You can do this by searching online. Put the oil name in quotation marks and then add the word "comedogenic" outside of the quotes.)

Bubbly Lather—You probably want bubbly lather, especially if you're selling or gifting your soap, since most people are used to that. Usually the bubbly lather pops up first, as soon as the soap gets wet, followed by denser, creamy lather as you use the soap.

Bubbly lather comes mostly from coconut oil, palm kernel oil, and castor oil. These all have disadvantages along with that advantage. Coconut oil is drying and can cause acne. (Odd that it would do both, but that's the case.) Many soapmakers avoid palm products for environmental reasons, and palm kernel oil is also drying. Castor oil accelerates trace, and this may be a handful for an inexperienced soapmaker.

Bubbly lather can be increased by adding up to one teaspoon of sugar per pound of oils. For this month's basic recipe, I deliberately reduced the amount of coconut oil, counting on the natural sugars in the beer and wine, plus sugar added to flatten the bubbles, to bring the lather up to normal.

Another way to boost bubbly lather is to make your soap in a log mold and cut the bars with a crinkle cutter. This works because the "corrugated" faces have a greater surface area than a straight cut. Surprisingly, the corrugations last for most of the life of the soap as it's used.

Creamy Lather—In most soaps, this is the thick second lather you get when you've used the soap for a few seconds. In Castile soap, this is the only lather you'll get. Quite a few fats, both vegetable and animal, have good values for creamy lather.

Iodine—A low value for iodine indicates that the soap will probably be hard. (This is a value I haven't used much.)

INS—The INS value is related to the soap's hardness to some degree, but I use it mostly to give me a picture of how easily my mixture will saponify. A value around 160 is ideal, but numbers as low as 130 are quite workable. The low values of some single oils indicate their difficulty—olive oil, at 109, is notoriously difficult. My experiments with canola and other low-INS vegetable oils were just that—experiments that produced, with a great deal of difficulty, unusable soap.

SoapCalc helpfully gives the values for individual oils for all these characteristics. If your recipe comes up short in one or more category, add or substitute an oil that's strong in what your mixture is missing.

Once I have a recipe that looks good numerically—fits into all the "good" ranges for the above values—I figure it for both a tiny test batch and a larger, normal-size batch. SoapCalc makes this easy—just change the quantity before printing out a second time. I strongly recommend a small-scale experiment at the start of testing any recipe. My first run with a new recipe will be a batch of two bars, 7.5 ounces total oil weight.

A Few Final Tips

• It's not easy to make small batches with a stick blender. For my "experiment-size" batch, I use a countertop blender.

• For small batches, I recommend weighing in grams. It's more accurate.

• If you need to round a measurement, do so conservatively. For example, if your scale didn't measure in tenths of a unit, then you'd normally round to the next whole number for amounts .5 and above. However, I try to look at the whole picture. If I'm superfatting at 5%—which would be close to minimal—I'll probably round lye amounts slightly down or oil amounts slightly up. For example, if the lye amount prescribed by SoapCalc was 29.6 grams, and my scale wouldn't read tenths of a gram, I'd round down to 29 instead of up to the mathematically correct 30.

• As you make your experimental batch, take notes.

• Let the soap cure and test it before you decide to make a large batch of the recipe with no changes.

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An Approach to Experimenting

Spanish wine label

Maybe instead of wanting to try a whole new formulation, you just have a specific question or two. For example, "Is it necessary to flatten beer and remove the alcohol before making soap?"

If that's the case, first do some research. In the case of beer and wine soap, I quickly found out—by asking a couple of chemist friends and searching online—that you absolutely do need to flatten beer or any other bubbly liquid before you make soap. The evidence was strong enough that I decided to accept it without testing. (I don't try absolutely everything, especially when it's sort of hazardous ...)

That left the part about removing the alcohol. I knew I wanted to freeze the beer or wine to avoid scorching, but that alcohol lowers the temperature at which a liquid will freeze. I tried freezing some beer and wine without boiling it to remove alcohol. The beer froze, the wine didn't. I made soap with the beer and tried it. It didn't seem especially drying—but at this point, I'd recommend testing a few bars yourself and seeing how it works on your own skin. And if you're selling beer or wine soap, it might well be a good idea to boil off the alcohol just to be safe, or to use non-alcoholic beverages to begin with.

When you're looking for an answer to a specific question like this, it's very important to use a tried and true recipe for your experiments. Don't branch out into unfamiliar recipes until you've nailed down the way the ingredient in question will behave, or the effect the technique in question will produce. Just one wild card per experiment! That way, you'll get results you can use.

I often tell students that, when you experiment, the only thing you are guaranteed to get is information. True as that is, it's also possible to get information to the effect that you should have done more research before you tried something, or that you didn't set up your experiment very well. Not the information you want. Research first, then experiment in such a way that your results tell you what you want to know.

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