This is an archived edition of our Field Report email newsletter. You can sign up at the bottom of the page!

Field Report #2

Greetings from Fat Gold!

So, it's fall! What's happening?

ALL THE THINGS ARE HAPPENING!

The olives are turning purple, though not all at once. In the grove, we can see the difference between the varieties, as some trees blush deeply while others remain bright green.

We've dispatched samples to the lab twice now, and both reports have been encouraging: beneath the flesh, the olives are low in moisture and high in fat.

It was a bit painful to part with the samples -- we don't have that many olives to spare! -- but the information is valuable, because it tells us which olive varieties to harvest first.

It's been a year of learning new things, and now everything comes to a point.

The harvest is here.

There are five main varieties of olives in the Fat Gold grove, and we'll be harvesting and milling each separately. That means we'll be able to send our subscribers a different oil each season -- some single varieties, some blends. How does our frantoio oil taste, vs. our leccino oil? We'll soon find out!

We'll be harvesting by hand and also with VIBRATING RAKES. These are a nice bit of cyborg augmentation: battery-powered, portable and flexible, gentle on the trees, but faster than purely manual harvesting.

About those subscriptions!

Now that we're closer to the harvest, we have a sense of how much oil we'll produce and how we're going to offer it to you.

To start, we're looking for 100 subscribers. (Note to readers on our website: after milling the oil and seeing how much we actually had, this turned out to be 80... and we filled those slots in two days!) You'll receive four 500ml tins of olive oil, all different, spaced out around the year. The first shipment, in December, will be our olio nuovo. That's the traditional Italian term for the season's first olive oil: unfiltered, cloudy, full of flavor.

We're calling ours FIRST CRUSH.

There are about 350 people receiving this email right now. To give everyone a fair shot, we're telling you now, ahead of time, that we'll send the link to subscribe to a year's worth of Fat Gold on November 13 at 10 a.m. Pacific Time. If you're keen on trying this olive oil (and supporting this project): watch your inbox!

–Kathryn and Robin