Made with Beer

I've recently become aware of the fact that some crazy people make soap with beer. Um, ew. Who wants to step out of the shower smelling like Sunday morning at the frat house? This is completely outside my realm of understanding. Why would you ruin perfectly good soap with perfectly good beer? Huh?

I'm all for using beer in cooking and even in mixed drinks. I am not for using beer in anything that can't be consumed. But this whole soap thing got me thinking. What other products out there are manufactured by misguided souls who don't realize that beer is for drinking?

Lucky for everyone, the Google tells me that there aren't many. Here's what I did find:

Perfume
At first, this sounds worse than beer-scented soap, but according to this article, the beer isn't being used to create the perfume's aroma. Instead, a company has found a way to use the waste products of beer making (barley, bacteria, etc) in place of petroleum in the perfume oil. So it's green perfume. Huh. Pretty cool, I guess.

Clothing
Crazy Shirt sells t-shirts dyed in beer. But scientists in Australia have taken that idea one step further. By converting the bacteria in fermenting wine to a film of "scum," they've developed a fabric that could potentially be used to make clothing. The only roadblock is that the fabric falls apart when the scum is dry...so, bathing suits maybe? I know that this one is technically made of wine, but the article does state that the same effect can be had with fermenting beer.

So that's all great, but I think I'm going to stick to drinking my beer. And I think you should too.