Odors neutralizing emollient coffee soap in juice box
Soap type: bar soap
Method: CPOP
Another soap I made some time ago. It was also my first time I tried to use juice soap box for mold, as well as coffee grounds.
I wanted to make odors neutralizing soap – especially good to be used in kitchen or after cleaning or gardening.
I was inspired by a recipe from The Soapmaker’s Companion named Dirt Buster.
It contains castor oil, wheat germ oil, jojoba oil and shea butter to nourish work-worn hands.
First I prepared juice box. It is really necessary to do it before starting to make soap, just to be sure it is ready:

Cut one side of the juice box so that the right part forms a lid and left, shorter part can be bend inside the box to form a side wall.
Then I estimated the volume of the recipe based on the volume of the box. 1 liter of juice means 1kg of water, which means around 1kg of soap.
Recipe
228g distilled water
80g NaOH
188g coconut oil
164g palm oil
90g wheat germ oil
59g jojoba oil
47g shea butter
47g of dried coffee grounds (wet are much heavier)
Instructions
1. I prepared my lye solution (dissolve NaOH in water).
2. At that time I didn’t know if it is better to add coffee grounds at trace or directly in the lye solution, so I added around 1/3 of it into the lye solution and the rest at trace. It might have helped release a bit of brown color to soap.
3. I melted fats with oils on very low heat (I was lazy, normally I would melt fats and add them to the oils)
4. I poured lye to oils and blended to thicker trace. Then added coffee grounds.

6. Finally I sprinkled the top with whole coffee beans to make it nice
7. Finally, I put the soap in the pre-heated oven (50°C) for two hours to ensure the gel phase. This is called cold process oven process (CPOP) method.
I cut the soap after 24 hours.
Thanks to coffee grounds the soap is quite scratchy. I was disappointed first, but then I got used to it for washing my hands.
And later, I got very positive reviews on it even for using in the shower 🙂
After all – I consider it definitely one of the best soaps I made…. which makes me think I should make one again soon.
When I published it on my slovak blog, I got some questions, so I already put here some tips:
– If you just make strong coffee and use it as part of water for dissolving lye, the soap will be still deodorizing and coffee grounds are not needed. This way the soap won’t be scratchy.
– You can use fresh ground coffee instead of coffee grounds 🙂
This entry was posted by evik on April 1, 2014 at 23:34, and is filed under soap recipes, soapmaking. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0.You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.
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#2 written by evik 6 years ago
Hi Monica, no, they did not boil over. Usually, “boiling over” occurs if you have sugars of any type in your soap (e.g. milk, sugar, honey…) or maybe alcohol, both accelerate the saponification reaction, what leads to overheating if heated also externally (or insulated) and therefore can lead to the “volcano effect”. It is good to check on your soap in the oven regularly, though.
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Your soaps look wonderful. Usually I’m making this soap once per year before the salmon season starts. But at the last show I have a lot of requests for this soap be made earlier this year. It’s in top 10 on my to do list for this month. It make all bad smells gone from your hands easy and naturally. I’m making it with “used” coffee grounds. When you making coffee first your soap has less caffeine and ground feel softer not scratchy. Cup of fresh Turkey style coffee always good edition to soap day. Thanks for sharing.
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#4 written by Kendy 6 years ago
I am new to soap making. I’m glad to find information about the science of soap making instead of only recipes.
We raise cattle so I have been making tallow, and one batch of tallow soap so far. Some people notice a slight tallow odor in the soap, do you think the coffee grounds would cover the odor? I do not like to add perfumes because of my allergies.
Another issue I have with the tallow is that the soap does not clean as well as I would like. The abrasiveness of coffee grounds should help. Do you think another oil should be blended with the tallow?-
#5 written by evik 6 years ago
Hi Kendy, I do not really work with tallow, only with shea butter that has similar odor to it and from my experience, the only way to get rid of it is to either reduce its amount in the recipe by adding other oils, or adding a scent, which can be also natural (essential oils like lavender are very well tolerated, but I guess you probably do not support those either). For instance I have at home soaps from a friends that contain tallow – one is with clove bud scent and another had only oil from bitter almond that made it smell like almonds. I suggest combine with coconut oil (20%-30%) or castor oil (10%) for more lather and cleansing and some olive oil or another similar oil (e.g. rapeseed or rice) to make it more conditioning. The coffee grounds instead indeed help with cleansing but are quite abrasive, which is fine if you wash after working in the garden or with animals. Coffee helps with deodorizing, I am just not sure if it covers the tallow odor… hope this helps and sorry for answering late, I was on vacation…
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#6 written by Anamaria 6 years ago
Hi Evik, thank you for all the information you share. I don’t know if you have an article on how to get very hard soap. I’ve heard there are two ingredients for this, sodium lactate an stearic acid, I’ d like to know which is better, and what are the quantities to put in a recipe, and on a on. Also what can I use to stop the soap from getting rancid. Thank you for all the knowledge you give us, please I would like to hear from you, as soon as you can
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As I wrote in a previous comment I am a big fan of hot process soap but reading your post I was realising that this is a wonderful method to obtain the same result and is not that time consuming as the hot method and no so prone to gel un-uniform (only in the centre as usually the cold process do)
It will be a nice soap to have in the kitchen and as you said in the shower too.
I will take into consideration your tips and dissolve the lye into a very strong coffee liquid and use it all around the house altogether the ingredients which You used are quiet nice and can be used all over the body I think.
A question now Evik. You have put the moulds I mean the juice boxes in the oven and supposedly you did not stir while there. Didn’t they boil over at 50 grade Celsius?
Thank you for shearing with us a new recipes.