TLDR: It didn’t work very well, and I am dubious about what the beer bought to the party.

I recently bought a roll of Foma Retropan 320 film – it comes in a nice hipster brown canister and the 320 speed is obscure enough to make it vaguely interesting. I was half way through the roll when it occurred to me to investigate how to actually develop it, and some research revealed two things: for best results you should be using a film-specific developer, and that others have commented that the film does not play well with rodinol.

I wasn’t about to go out and buy developer just for one roll of film, so I did the next most obvious thing – I developed it in beer..and some other stuff…

This idea was mostly prompted by this video and some further research into what was actually going on in the developing tank when you add beer, vitamin C and washing soda.

I won’t bore you with the details, but I was a little dubious about what the beer was actually bringing to the party, when you are adding two other things to a mixture that look suspiciously like chemicals you do wonder, but I pressed on nonetheless.

So there are a couple of things to note about the video – the first is that whilst we are told, explicitly, to use ‘washing soda’ the soda that is actually used is Bicarbonate of Soda. The beer in the video is Guinness. No one mentions what speed the film is…it might matter, it might not, but its not mentioned. The final thing is that the beer has to be warmed to 30 degrees.

So here is how I deviated from the video, the first way, as you might have guessed from the title of this post is that I didn’t waste a can of guinness on this experiment – I used homebrew. Well, we actually brewed it at London Beer Lab, but it was brewed by me and my buddies. We didn’t follow the recipe very well, and no one will ever be able to make this beer again because we didn’t record what we put in it. Anyway, the beer we made was a black IPA. The second way I deviated from the video is that I bought washing soda, which is sodium carbonate, not bicarbonate of soda. The final way is that I couldn’t really be bothered to check the temperature of my beer, so I eyeballed it (IE – I put the bottle in some warm water before I started).

So with all these variables I was not particularly hopeful that I’d be seeing anything amazing when I broke open my developing tank – and my suspicions were correct – it was crap. I had perhaps seven pictures from a roll of 36, and these were so poorly developed that I nearly threw everything out thinking that there was nothing there.

However, messing with some settings on the scanner I was able to coax a couple of good images from the roll, I didn’t do any post-processing on these, so we can confidently say this is what ‘beer’ would look like as an instagram filter. Also, you’ll notice that because I wasn’t confident that there was anything there at all, I didn’t pay too much attention to getting the film clean before I dried it:

I was also able to coax a few far less impressive ones:

[Show slideshow]

You’ll notice a lot of my cat being a model in there, I told her about my beer developing mission and she wanted to get involved, and I am glad that one of the best images is of her.

So it turns out that film developer exists for a reason, I think even if I had followed all of the instructions this wouldn’t have given me anything like the quality I can usually obtain from even a second rate developer. However, when you are developing with beer, everything smells a lot nicer than when you use conventional chemistry. What is pretty cool about the whole experiment though is that no one will ever be able to develop film in that beer again (we made 60 bottles, and have drunk all of them), these are the only images that will ever come out of that beer, not like all those boring guinness developed images that are probably out there. Will I do it again? No. Are my unique one of a kind images the best I have ever shot? No. Was it good fun? Yes. Should I have just consumed the beer instead? Probably.