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Hi Everyone
I'm George and it appears that soaping is going to be my most recent obsession with making things myself. As you may guess from my user name, I'm also a brewer and started researching soaping with the idea of making some beer soaps and using up some older hops that are no longer as predictable in beer as they should be. After lots of research online, I made my first batch on September 10th and have done three more since then.
Not wanting my first batch to be overly complicated, I started with a simple recipe. Everything turned out well up to cutting and setting aside for curing, so a few days later I tried the beer soap. I went all-out with the beer theme, adding everything I could think of - swapping a boiled and frozen IPA for the water, infusing some of the base oil with hop pellets, and adding chopped hop flowers and ground crystal malt grains at trace for decoration and exfoliant. Except for the horrible smell (which I now know through further reading is normal with beer) it again turned out well through cutting. At this point, my wife expressed interest in having a soap made with a more feminine smell the the Brambleberry Wasabi I used for the first one, so I dutifully turned out another batch with BB's Cherry Blossom - and this time I tried a swirl even though a stiff trace somewhat hindered my efforts there. Last Saturday, my oldest daughter visited and asked if I could make some vegan soap for her. Sure! I just swapped Crisco for the lard that I had used in the previous batches, colored it with some tumeric and charged ahead. (recalculating lye, of course) Again, everything worked as expected. It gelled so much that it looked like orange jello in the mold, but it cut just fine tonight and produced beautiful jewel-like orange bars.
So far so good, right? Well, that brings me to my question. The recipe I used for all these soaps was what I thought was a basic all-around combo of 30% Lard, 30% Olive Oil, 30% Coconut oil, and 5% each of Avocado and Castor oils, at a 5% superfat. All run through the soapcalc lye calculator, of course. I put this together based on my reading and what was available and priced well, with a bit of advice from a friend who has been making her own soap for her family for a few years. It appears that I may have jumped the gun a bit and/or misunderstood some of what I read, because it seems that level of Coconut oil might be a problem. I've been good about leaving the soaps strictly alone to cure (lots of waiting in brewing, so I'm used to it...) But after reading your site today about Coconut oil, I got a little worried. Tonight, I took one of the small cut end pieces of the first soap I made and tested it. It's only been curing for two weeks, but it passed the zap test and it's quite hard, plus it's a small piece and I don't much care whether it lasts.
As you may have guessed by now, this is a VERY drying soap. Everything else is good - lots of bubbles, nice lather, great cleaner, etc - but my hands feel like I've washed them in Dawn dishwashing liquid all day. All four batches, 48 bars, nearly 10 lbs of soap total were made with this 30% Coconut oil recipe and I have no reason to suspect they won't all be the same, drying soap.
Obviously, I won't do that again, but is there anything I can do with these to make them more comfortable to use? Some kind of rebatch, perhaps? Adding some kind of shea or avocado butter in the process? It would be a shame to have to grate up all these beautiful bars, but that's better than being stuck with half a year's supply of dubious soaps.
Thanks in advance!
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