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

Greetings from Fat Gold!

The 2022 harvest is complete. We’ve produced the oil for a year’s worth of Fat Gold Standard and Fat Gold Blue, along with our four shipments to annual subscribers, who, as usual, will get the first taste of 2022 in their December shipment.

This dispatch will be very short, almost a postcard:

WISH YOU WERE HERE, because our new olive mill is fully installed and operational!

The olives go up here:

The mill's olive elevator

Then they get sliced apart in here:

The mill's crusher

The oil particles find each other here (hi, Kathryn!):

Kathryn and her dream machine

Finally, the oil is separated in here:

The mill's decanter

Back in March, when we announced we’d bought our own mill, we wrote:

Big questions remain, chief among them: will the mill arrive, and will we be able to install it, in time for this year’s harvest? We are hoping the answer is “yes” …

Of course, the answer turned out to be “no,” and here’s the twist: we got VERY lucky.

In retrospect, if this mill had arrived in mid-October, and we’d rushed to install and master it while ALSO juggling the logistics of harvest, moving olives around, worrying about weather… yikes. Honestly, it might have been a disaster—and not the kind you laugh about later.

Instead, we put a great harvest on the books, our smoothest yet, and then turned with our full attention to this new challenge.

You’re going to be hearing a lot more about this machine next year. (Of course, we’ll be capturing video clips to update the milling section of our guide to extra virgin olive oil.) The mill is the heart of an olive oil business, and we are excited to have our own, at last. It’s only possible because of your great support, these five years past.

We can’t wait to put this dream machine to work and share its gifts with you.

From the mill,

–Robin, Kathryn, and Bryan

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