Pure Nuff Stuff

Every now and again a customer will ask us to make a product, sometimes it's something similar to one we already make, but every now and again people come up with a request we just haven't thought about before.  Getting on for nearly 9 months ago now, a regular customer here in the shop asked us to make a kitchen soap that would cope with her own kitchen niffs (no-one likes garlicky hands do they?) but also her husband's when he comes home from work.  He's a fisherman, quite a tough job in itself of course, but it left us with quite a tough job too - how do you get rid of fishy smells?

Of course we thought immediately of the citrus family, I use grapefruit essential oil so liberally at home (we have a dog) that visitors immediately ask if we're growing them inside the house.  So we tried a really strong grapefruit oil soap, it smelled great (and did a fabulous job of cleaning my dog when she'd rolled in something unpleasant) but it didn't pass the Fisherman Test.  So we turned to a combination of Orange and Grapefruit oils, again, it smelled great, but wasn't quite up to the task.  So we thought and thought about it and the inspiration came to us quite litterally over a cup of coffee. Dougie and I locked eyes when we saw the coffee grounds in the bottom of the cup - of course!  

So off I trotted again up to see Cath at the beautiful Honey Pot just up the street from us and she happily obliged by donating a couple of kilos of used coffee grounds for us to experiment with - the re-use part of this really appealed to me, but I won't lie by saying I didn't take the chance to stop and have a cake and coffee there, it'd be mad not to to be honest.

Suitably refreshed, I trundled off back to the workshop to begin another series of tests.  The grounds had to be dried out first of course, so this gave us a couple days to really think about the essential oil blends.  We settled on three to test out and were delighted (some 10 weeks later when the soap was ready, it's not a quick process soap-making lark) to hear that we finally had a bar which passed the ultimate test!   In truth, the soap doesn't smell strongly of Orange (which has shocked us, we know how much went in there and it should pong!) because the grounds do such a wonderful job of neutralising all odours.  But the test batch we did with no essential oils at all didn't do the same job, so we know which works.

Finally, the name is a bit of an odd one, but what else do you call something full of coffee and orange?  It just screamed "Breakfast" to me!