Our Handmade Soap Process
The process for making every product at Alpenglow is lengthy and precise. There are no purchased mixes. We don’t contract manufacture, i.e. have a lab make product for us. Everything is made entirely by hand, from scratch, using wildcrafted, organic and only 100% natural ingredients. This creates a far more beneficial, healthy and delightful end product, similar to the way that cookies and tomatoes purchased at a store do not compare to homemade cookies and homegrown tomatoes.
Above you see us pouring fresh soap in a mold. I've blended organic olive oil, organic coconut oil and organic shea butter with lye, adding botanicals and essential oils. My formula is based on the quality of the oils. My priorities being - moisturizing, rich bubbly lather, rinsing clean and the bar lasting a long time.
Our double cavity mold makes 144 bars per side. So a batch of goat milk soap, shea butter soap or shampoo bars - all with slightly different ingredients and scents, makes 864 bars.
Here Susan de-molds – that is removes the mold after the soap has saponified and hardened for a two and a half days.
Wax paper lines the molds so the soap doesn’t stick. Here Susan removes the wax paper before slicing.
Our bar slicer works by forcing wires through the large block mold. This cuts the huge block into towers.
We then slice those towers into bars using a different wireframe on the slicer. It’s a lot of hard work, but pleasant indeed and it smells fantastic.
Above is full tray of Shampoo & Shave Bars. It takes about 4 hours and two people to slice and clean up 3 molds of soap or shampoo bars.
We wrap each bar by hand with a recylcable paper wrapper. This allows you to pick up, smell and handle a bar and see it's goodness. No need to hide this gem in a box or wrap it in plastic. Save the wrapper as a bookmark and your book will smell good!
For optimal longevity, we cure our bar shampoo and soaps for a full month before we wrap and sell them. We have one rack for Goat Milk Soaps, one rack for Shampoo & Shave Bars and one for Shea Butter Soaps. You should smell our workshop!