While this colour change is going on, the amount of oil inside the olive is increasing. This is the stage where delivering olives to the mill for processing means bigger yields of oil out of the crop: always a good thing. Olives that are pricked and processed while under-ripe and predominantly green give around 4 to 6% olive oil at the end of the process - but mixed colour or black olives can easily give around 20% olive oil for the same weight of raw olives.
A modern olive mill (technically not a press and a centrifuge does the job of separating olive oil from the vegetable matter these days) takes around an hour from the olives entering the line where a leaf blower will remove and stray leaves, through a washer to remove dust, then a hammer mill to crush the olives into a paste and into a series of malaxers to gently stir the paste to allow the oil to separate.
After around 20 minutes of stirring, the paste is pumped into the fast-spinning centrifuge which will allow the lighter oil to be removed from the heavier and denser water and vegetable matter - known as pomace. The oil fraction is cloudy at this stage and needs time for the solids to settle out, giving clear oil.
]]>2021 has seen a bumper crop in terms of size and quality for the Hunter Valley. Belarna Grove started picking in mid February - early for us - with some fabulous green California Queen olives. These are one of the best of the green varieties and we have 3 large 200 litre barrels full!
The picking of oil olives will start up soon - assuming the rain finally stops! Our early dry season has turned wet recently, and this may well slow down the picking as olives tend to want to hang on the trees once they are wet, so we may have to wait a week or so for things to dry out again. You need to be patient.
It will not be long before we have some fresh 2021 Extra Virgin unfiltered, cloudy, green and super vibrant olive oil ready to go. Get in quick as the best always goes very quickly.
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