Hot Process Pure Coffee Soap, Grounds and All

#coffeesoap #starbuckssumatrablend #coffeegrounds #hotprocesscoffeesoap

So after a few "curing" days our first batch of coffee soap, which we called Coffee with Cream is decidedly smelling like a loaded French vanilla, mocha, Venti-sized coffee.

It is coffee, but seems to be a bit on the mocha side. 

                                             

Coffee with Cream on left, is much lighter in color, and as we mentioned it's like coffee with a sweet twist.

The color of this 2nd batch

is much darker

(see bar on right).

Now, don't get us wrong. Our Coffee with Cream batch is all good; we love the smell, but the customer who requested this scent wanted it to be more coffee and less mocha.  So what are we to do? You guessed it, make another batch of "pure" coffee soap, no French vanilla coffee FO in this one.

We used our favorite HP soap recipe consisting of coconut, palm, olive and castor oils with the bonus addition of coffee butter for its rich texture & smell.  

The fragrance oil we used, Coffee House, comes from +Rustic Escentuals. They describe it by saying that "you'll find notes of coffee beans and freshly brewed coffee accentuated by hints of rum, bandy, brown sugar and cocoa beans."  Even with all the additional scents added, this one still smells just like you've walked into a local coffee house. Straight on coffee, we love it.

We used strongly brewed (Starbucks Sumatra Blend) coffee (brewed with distilled water) as our liquid. With our ingredients lined up, we were just about ready to make some serious coffee soap.

 

You can see the coffee grounds, we added about 1-1/2 TBSP of the Sumatra Blend (finely ground) to the oils used in this batch.

We poured the distilled coffee water & lye mixture into the oils in the crock pot. Seems like dark brown is the theme color for today!

This is what the batter looked like

after cooking on high for thirty minutes (covered).

After cooking for 1 hour and 45 minutes, it was done.  We did the zap test (carefully stick your tongue to a small amount of batter, if it shocks you like a 9V battery it's not done.  If it's just HOT and tastes like soap when rinsed off, soap is done), and all we tasted was soap.

Soap was done!

Next we added the fragrant Coffee House FO. It's amazing, seriously.  We've already said it, but we'll say it again: it smells like walking into a coffee shop.

Once the FO was completely mixed into the batter, we plopped it into the silicone mold where it will cure for a couple of days.

Two days later we un-molded the soap. It smells great - less mocha-ish and more straight coffee. The bars are a great size, and we think our customer will be very happy with this soap.

Love how the coffee grounds show up! Truly a "coffee" soap!

Nice dark brown coffee color.

This soap will be ready to use in a week.