Soapy experiment

I've been wanting to make a purple marble soap for a while, so when I ended up with half a jar of burgundy lees from my blueberry mead making I decided to use that. Lees is the sediment, all the minerals and larger organic particles, from the honey, fruit and yeast used in the mead making process. Sometimes wine is aged on the lees, sur lie I think it's called, but most times the liquid is racked off (funneled with a hose) into a new container without disturbing the lees. Then the lees gets tossed...

Which I just could not do, not even for chicken scraps, it's all the good stuff and then concentrated! I decided to use it to marble in a soap recipe even tho I could not find any mention on google anywhere of soap makers having done that before... Of course, I make soap with whatever I can stuff in so that does not deter me too much but it's always nice to know ahead of time what to watch out for...

First odd thing that happened was that when I added the bright burgundy to the early trace soap the color immediately changed to bright green. The stuff is acid and I added it to a base! My goodness, chemistry at work :) Only too bad that bright kelp green did not last either, it again changed and now to a deep golden yellow. During gelling the color deepened, as gelling tends to do, from gold to chestnut and made quite a nice marble pattern.

Second odd thing was that the brick did not want to gel properly. I did not use heat, only my new foam insulators, but kept it covered for too long apparently as the oils in the soap partially separated. But only in the parts of the soap with the lees, not the standard soap mixture... weird. It did firm up nicely, and cut easily, but the colored marble has coconut oil beads all around the edges which does not look too good (it is a build in moisturizer tho). And then it hit me - lees is alcolic! And highly alcoholic, at least as high as wine! The soap seized from the alcohol, and that prevented proper gel...

So for my new Apple Jack soap, made with apple cider mead lees, I slowly boiled the lees to evaporate the alcohol, as I normally do when making beer or wine soaps. I hoped to make two recipes of this for my sales inventory and are really glad I found out before loosing another batch! Oh well, we live and learn - and now have a stack of beautiful marbled moisturizing soaps for gifts :)