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 harvest is upon us! Here’s how the days are shaping up:
3:30 a.m.: Alarm goes off.
3:37 a.m.: Moka pot coffee is ready.
4:30 a.m.: Kathryn and Robin arrive at the mill. Robin powers up the machines while Kathryn coordinates the olives. The air is cold, and the sky still blazes with stars.
6:00 a.m.: First olives dumped in the hopper. This fruit is around 60 degrees F, just what we want.
6:45 a.m.: First oil emerges from the decanter. It’s very tasty, but still cloudy—sort of like a hazy IPA.
6:50 a.m.: Kathryn tastes, then decides on the day’s mill settings. She’s responding to the specifics of variety and ripeness, making sure the oil we produce is fruity and pungent, all in balance.
7:00 a.m.: Robin drinks first of approximately a hundred tiny coffees from the Nespresso machine.
8:00 a.m. We start the filter. The hazy oil comes out brilliantly clear, ready to bottle.
10:30 a.m.: Kathryn confers on the phone with Bryan, who holds down the fort in the San Francisco Bay Area, packing and shipping your orders.
11:00 a.m.: Robin eats his standing lunch: hummus from Nina’s Bakery in Fresno slathered on sourdough from Culture Bakehouse: as good or better than anything from San Francisco.
11:30 a.m.: We continue to taste the oil as it emerges, making adjustments as needed.
12:30 p.m.: More olives arrive from the grove. We load the macro bins into the hopper, one by one. Most days, we mill twelve of these bins, about six tons.
1:00 p.m.: The cool of morning has burned away now, so we hurry. If the temperature crests 80 degrees F, the oil will suffer.
1:15 p.m.: We dump the last bin of olives. It’s about a forty-five minute journey from the hopper through to the crusher, the mixer, and the decanter.
2:00 p.m. Last drop of oil emerges from the Fat Gold mill.
2:30 p.m. Cleanup begins. The pressure washer roars as we blast off every bit of dirt, every loose olive leaf.
4:30 p.m. Cleanup complete. We weigh the day’s production and power down the mill.
5:30 p.m. Home again. Harvest dinners are simple and hearty: burgers, soup, pasta… slathered in superfresh olive oil. We drink exactly one beer.
8:00 p.m. Bedtime!
This year, the first taste of the harvest will go to our annual subscribers, in the batch shipped in early December. If you are not yet a subscriber, there’s time to join up…
…or to purchase a gift subscription for someone you love:
https://fat.gold/subscribe/gift/
The subscription is four tins, all different oils, sent in December, March, June, and September. (The olives pictured above are a beautiful batch of koroneiki, milled just for subscribers…)
Annual subscribers get the first taste; we’ll release the fresh 2025 oil to everyone else early next year.
That’s it for now! The harvest is in full swing, and there is still a lot of work ahead. Our alarms go off early… and our oil tastes great. We are happy and proud to be making this for you!
From the harvest,
–Robin, Kathryn, and Bryan