Thread: Hard water!

A month or so ago I got into a conversation with a local soap purveyor from whom I've bought a couple of shave soaps. We hit on this topic of hard water and lathering and he, oddly it seemed to me, hadn't really stumbled on the fact that distilled water can be an aid in lathering. He found it interesting simply because he gets a fair number of compliments on how well his soaps lather (which matches my experience with his products). With the discussion came a realization that the fact that he tests his formulas with tap water, which is notoriously hard in St. Louis. The fact that he tested with very hard water resulted in soaps that lather well with almost anything else. Sometimes in-depth knowledge takes a backseat to luck and a little work.

Niftyshaving's comments on tallow quality is interesting to me on a professional level. My educational background is in ruminant nutrition and I spent a number of years working with the dairy industry. From a nutritional standpoint the volatile fatty acids (VFAs) we are most concerned with are propionate and butyrate. The former is generated by the rumen microbial population when supplied with a ration high in forage (grass, hay, silage, etc.) and drives milk production. The later is a product of starch metabolism (corn) and drives intramuscular fat deposition (marbling).

The fact is that tallow is a byproduct so it isn't something many people in the animal agriculture industry are particularly concerned about from a quality standpoint. If there is a substantial difference in soap quality based on these VFAs, or their resulting metabolic compounds, then I'd be rather interested, intellectually, in knowing which is preferable. The majority of beef cattle in the U.S. are finished on a grain diet, which means that the butyrate tallow is plentiful. Grass-fed beef is growing in popularity but still accounts for a very small percentage of animals sent to slaughter and dairy cattle have very low body fat, comparatively. So if there is a big difference between one tallow source and the other, and the soap producers are aware and actually care about it, there could be an issue with actually obtaining the desired tallow.

Great, another rabbit-hole to explore in my free time...