Teach Soap

Hi All,
so i had a kind of different experience today. Well actually it started last night and continued into today. I had what i thought was just a super idea, i wanted to make a cocoa butter soap and since it has that intoxicating chocolaty scent i wanted to sort of add to it by making my lye mixture with a good freshly ground dutch chocolate coffee. I went through the motions of making and cooling the coffee and then i added the lye and started to stir. OMG! it smelled like dead zebras in the house! clearly that got thrown out and i decided to try again so i made the coffee again but this time froze it into cubes over night.

Today I got up and got my cubes all weighed out and slowly added the lye, wouldn't you know? It smelled funky again, not as bad, but still not great. I finished mixing and decided to give it a try anyway. Currently the soap is soaping in the mold, i keep sniffing it, i still detect some unpleasantness.

three questions:
1. why did that happen?

2. will this scent dissipate through the saponification process?

3. has anyone else changed their liquid out in this manner, i know you can change it to a milk, so why not a coffee, or tea? I have even found a really neat site that uses beer as their liquid.

thanks so much!
Erin

Adding coffee to your lye water will always make it stinky, but that should go away after the cure. Many of us have used other liquids ie tomato juice at 100% instead of water to make soap with.

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Irena
Closed minds are like faulty parachutes; they refuse to open.

Being a total newbie to CP I get surprised at pretty much everything.
Two days ago I made a small batch with 50% olive oil. The oil had been used before as a preservative for marinated pork loin.
I know this is not an advised thing, but I had a lot of oil and wanted to make the most of it.
This was my first scented soap, so I stayed in the safe side and used just 2% FO, a lovely sweet milky FO.
The next day my soap smelled... porky
Not a faint milky smell, just porky.
But two days later the porky smell have vanished, and the lovely sweet milky smell have turned up. Just a faint, but discernible sweet smell.
Basic CP soaping is very easy, but I guess we need a lot of experience to know how scenting things behave.

I feel for you... my first batch (outside of class) was stinky because I added kelp (seaweed) and cucumber FO to it. That soap is now useable... at least as a hand soap. I was greatful some smells do lessen over time. There sure is alot to learn!

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Susie
Sometimes A Mistake is so much fun, You just have to do it again!

I have used brewed coffee as well as coffee grounds in my soap but I've learned not to expect any of the coffee smell to survive... you need to add FO if you want a coffee fragrance. The coffee itself will only really color your soap plus add to the label appeal. The coffee grounds are a great exfoliator... but use sparingly until you know just how scrubby they can be.

Now that porky soap... that's interesting.
If I could do something like that with bacon grease... and use beer as my liquid... I think I could have a really good superbowl soap to sell to the guys in my family
Beer + Bacon = Love

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- Mickey!

Ah Yes, coffee grounds.....

In my wee beginnings of soapmaking I made my brother in law (A Florida Highway patrolman- You KNOW cops love coffee, lol) a batch with coffee grounds. He likes to refer to it as the soap with rocks. VERY scrubby- like sandpaper ouch!

If I could do something like that with bacon grease... and use beer as my liquid... I think I could have a really good superbowl soap to sell to the guys in my family
Beer + Bacon = Love

Mickey- I'll take 3 bars.

I made a VERY scrubby coffee soap intended to be used in the kitchen to remove tough stains and odors.
I found out that my sister-in-law was using it in the shower and loving it. You just never know how people will be about exfoliants.

@ Dave - I just need to finish frying about 10 pounds of bacon so I have enough grease to make it

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- Mickey!