How we make amazing EVOO
February 2021 officially marks a year since PRMRY launched, and, gosh, have we learned a lot — from updating bottle closures to tweaking our labels, and loads more lessons in between.
One of the biggest lessons, however, had to do with how best to go about sourcing olives and producing reliably amazing extra virgin. We want to share more about this with you since, as we've changed up our olive varieties — something we've always anticipated changing from year to year, based on quality and availability.
You see, producing olive oil requires the coming together of four things: 1) olives, which have varying harvests (typically, one year is a high-production year, and the next one isn’t — the harvests alternate years), 2) timing of when the olives are ready to be picked, 3) labor available to harvest the olives, and 4) a (quality) mill and miller that are able to take the olives immediately upon harvesting. The stars truly must align for all four of these things to happen at once (and this is also why being a small producer is so challenging!).
The stars must align to make exceptional extra virgin.
So, throughout each year, our goal is to maintain a conversation with farmer friends to see how things are going with their crops. But then it’s time for the aforementioned alignment! During our first year it was pretty chaotic and while we thankfully ended up with extremely good oil, it still felt like too much of a gamble.
As a result, this past year we decided to revolve our decisions around the milling — working with really good mills and a really good miller (our friend, talented miller, and olive-and-olive-mill-coordinating extraordinaire Kathryn Tomajan, to be exact) — because ultimately, inadequate milling can destroy what could otherwise be a great oil made from healthy, fresh olives.
From there, we selected olive varieties that we loved and knew would produce the olive oil profiles (ENHANCE and TRANSFORM) that we were looking for. In the end, our second harvest went SO smoothly, and while we know we’re a little biased, we have to say the finished products are total perfection.
We sure are thrilled to share the fruits of this past year's labor with you. Now, let's see what lessons we learn in 2021 ;).