Developing photos in beer.

Maybe you have heard of “beerol”, maybe you haven’t. Maybe you just want to develop your film in a totally different and crazy way. Beer is one of the ways. A film developer needs three things - a phenol, an accelerator and an alkali. Other things are just the fine tuning.

To develop in beer you first need a beer - any beer will do, and dependent upon the beer you get quite different results. It’s fun to experiment with. Then you need an accelerator - ascorbic acid (Vitamin C) is the environmentally friendliest and simplest to procure and an alkali that also buffers the solution somewhat - here the easiest and again easiest to procure is wash soda.

Then it’s experiment time. How long? What temperature? Agitation or no agitation?

Here I hope to answer most of those questions for you. I have had the advantage of being able to conduct my experiments with 9x12 cm film and 4x5 inch film. One shot stuff - so I dont have the chance to ruin an entire roll. I have the second advantage of being a trained experimental scientist - and I can even remember how to conduct an experiment to limit the variables.

So here’s the results:

Beerol recipe. (1 liter developer)

To one litre of beer (your choice) first add 8 tablespoons of wash soda. Check the pH with a pH strip to make sure it is above 9 - above 10 is even better. If it isn’t (beer is in itself acidic) add one more tablespoon . Stir to ensure it is all dissolved

Then add 2 tablespoons of table salt. If you use iodized table salt (against all the myths on the internet) you reduce the fogging that these alternative developers can produce. The iodide in the salt works just like pottasium bromide in a commercial developer. Again stir.

Now - carefully - make sure you have a vessel that is large enough to allow foaming - add 4 tablespoons of Vitamin C . Stir and let the solution sit until the bubbles have all subsided .

You know have a beerol developer. Develop, stop and fix your film exactly as you normally would, using the beerol as a one shot developer. This is a so-called “universal” recipe - you can develop any black and white film in it with the same time/temperature scale, you dont have to change the time of development dependent upon the film. At 20 degrees you will need - with 10 second agitation every minute and constant agitation for the first minute - 11 minutes to develop your film.

Have fun experimenting