What Madness is This?

We are always ready for a challenge and this was no exception.  Experimentation has yielded some really great soaps over the years, as well as helped us improve our techniques and efficiency.  I'm not sure where this one will lead, but it was fun and interesting.

In a quest for ingredients, we managed to acquire what I guess can best be described as the dregs from brewing beer.  After the beer has been brewed and the liquid has been strained out of the grains, this is what is left...

Tina dug right in and started squeezing and straining the liquid that was left in the grains.

We weighed out some of the trimmings from our soaps - a little bit of everything we make - and put them in an electric roaster.

Then, we poured some of the "beer" over the trimmings and set it to "roast."  This reheating of soap bits is called rebatching.

We also ground up some of the solids from the beer dregs and added them to the soap to make it a bit scrubby.

In a couple of hours, this is what resulted....   Looks pretty good, huh?

We added some fragrance.  In this case we used Citrus Sage, a yummy unisex scent that we really like. We don't use it in any of our regular soaps, but we often have various scents around to try out. Then we  "glopped" the cooked soap into a mold.

The next morning, the soap came out of the mold.  Because this "batter" is much stiffer when it is placed in the mold, fissures and pits often form.  It is a bit more moist than our usual soaps, also a bit softer and so...

We waited another day to cut the soap into a bit larger size than our normal bars.  It will need to dry out a bit more and I will stamp our quilt stamp on each bar.  

These soaps will not be a part of our line...  they are somewhat experimental. This will be a "hearty" soap.   They will be available as soon as they are ready on my sister's website,  The Essential Herbal.

We have a new rebatch in the mold as I type and I'll post that one with much less detail later!