At Honest Toil, they are determined to share an olive oil (available in 500ml bottles, 2 litre, 3 litre or 5 litre containers) that’s exactly how it comes in the village, fresh from the press; it’s completely unfiltered, so once pressed, it isn’t put through any additional processes. Everything is pressed the same day it’s picked and the oil has an acidity of between 0.2-0.3%, which is impressively low. It’s also completely unblended: unlike most “extra virgin olive oil” found on supermarket shelves, it really is small-batch production, and isn’t mixed with inferior oils or oil from previous harvests… consequently it tastes ridiculously good. As it's unfiltered, the oil contains the sediment from olive skins and pips, giving it a great green opaqueness with a thick texture, and the raw, grassy result is pretty much the same thing the ancient Greeks would have consumed!
Both the lands and the village presses here are locally owned and run as family businesses – groves with a few hundred trees are considered large farms, which is in stark contrast to the intensive, large-scale olive oil production characteristic of other big olive cultivating regions. They harvest the olives with traditional, manual, low-impact methods, using sticks with ‘propeller-like’ endings that remove the olives from the branches, letting them fall onto large nets spread underneath the trees. The olives are then gathered into sacks and taken to the village press in the evening.
Presses here still function on a collective basis: farmers bring in the harvested olives and hand over a percentage of the oil in exchange for the pressing. Everyone knows everyone and the whole process is based on trust – this is how’s been for centuries. Together with Tom’s family, they look after their four small olive groves, harvesting them with the help of family and friends every year. As customers have started to notice that this oil really is something different, they have debated taking a loan to buy more olive trees, but instead decided to employ a different model and work with the other small farmers in the neighbourhood. This way, they can guarantee an income for them and support local, traditional forms of olive picking, making sure that the high quality extra virgin olive oil from these groves ends up directly on your table instead of being mixed in with inferior oils by big-scale, big-production corporations.
The whole ethos is based on direct cooperation; with small-scale farmers, as well as small businesses along the line, including delivery, distributors and the stockists that ultimately sell the fruits of our toil. They are determined to keep it simple, so just produce the one variety of olive, and the result is a properly cold-pressed, completely unblended and unfiltered extra virgin olive oil; it really is just raw squashed Koroneiki olives.
Polyphenols: A fresh harvest of olive oil was tested in December - it's an expensive test, but more and more people seem to be using Polyphenol as a guide to quality, so it was time to get tested. The batch from the November 2023 crop had a Polyphenol level of 410mg/kg - significantly above the 250mg/kg EU Regulation to be regarded as "high-polyphenol" content olive oil!
This olive oil is "agoureleo" (early harvest), properly cold-pressed, and solely from Koroneiki olives (the olive variety with the highest polyphenol count in the world!). These are picked before fully ripe, and press the same day, so all the necessities for the much-coveted high Polyphenol content.
This Honest Toil Olive Oil is available in 500ml, 2 litre, 3 litre and 5 litre containers.
