Homemade Coffee Scrub Soap Recipe

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Have you ever had something that every time you used it you said (or thought) to yourself “aww yeah, this is the stuff”?

That’s how I feel when I use this soap.

It’s mild, it’s soft, it’s invigorating, and it’s not your average soap bar.

It’s SO much more than that.

It’s all the comforts of your favorite cup of coffee in a bar of soap.

But that shouldn’t be intimidating. Far from it! This is one of the simplest, easiest homemade soap recipes you will ever make!

Here’s a few things you should know about my soap recipes:

I like to keep things simple, and for that reason, I tend to use very basic fats. Different fats have a different affect on your final bar. Some make it soft, some make it hard, others make a frothy lather, or a stable lather.

That said, the saponification process chemically changes the oil into something completely different. That was a tough pill for me to swallow when I first learned about the different affects the different oils had, and that I would need to add corn or soy oil to my soap bars to counteract the hardness of the coconut oil in them.

Up until that point, I had been avoiding industrial cooking oils (soy, corn, canola) like a plague.

But soaping up with a saponified oil is far different from ingesting the raw oil, and so, my family benefits from a far softer bar of soap.

So having mentioned the soy, and coconut oils, the other main oil I use is olive oil.

An important thing to note about using coconut and olive oils in soap making, is that you don’t actually need to use the highest quality, most expensive oil on the market. Actually, the second pressing olive oil makes a higher quality bar than extra virgin, as does expeller pressed coconut oil. (You can read all about the best oils for soap making in the book The Soapmaker’s Companion)

The other two ingredients in this soap recipe are pretty obvious – you need coffee, to make it coffee soap, and lye to make, well, to make it soap.

So here goes!

Ingredients:

6 oz of hot spring/purified water
1 teaspoon coffee grounds
2 oz lye
5 oz coconut oil
5 oz olive oil
6 oz soybean oil (also known as vegetable oil)

Instructions:

Tip: you will want a digital read out food scale for the most accurate results as using liquid measuring cups results in varying results)
Mix coffee ground in water to make coffee and allow to cool
Mix lye and coffee together until lye beads or crystals have dissolved
Allow to cool again to between 120-130º (a great tool for instantly measuring your soaping temperatures is an infrared instant read thermometer)
Combine oils and heat to about 120º as well
When all your ingredients are relatively close in temperature, it’s time to mix them together!
You can either mix vigorously with a spoon for as long as 45 minutes, or use a stick blender to pulse and stir – which should take about 5-6 minutes
Either way, store until your soap mixture reaches a trace (you can read more about soap tracing here)
Pour into molds, and cover
Set your soap away in a safe place for a few days to let it set up and harden.
After that, you can unfold your soap, and cut it into bars if you used a loaf type mold
Put your soap back away in a safe place, and continue to let it cure for three weeks.
That’s it! After three weeks, you soap is ready to use.
Note: This is a cold process soap making method. You can read instructions here on how to make hot process soap, which can be used right away here (you can use these ingredients in place of the ones called for).
Enjoy!