Honest Toil is the product of small family farms, including some of our own, as well as many others in the villages around here. We’re based in the town of Kyparissia, in the Western Peloponnese, Greece. We live and work here, this is our home. We are not a mega farm, we cannot produce enough oil to feed our family and sell as well. This is why we are partnering with other small growers.

Honest Toil is 100% Koroneiki olives, they are the olives you see here, and basically in our whole area. This is the most ancient and most typical olive in Greece, with a characteristic grassy flavour and a naturally high polyphenol content.

Koroneiki olives start out bright green and will slowly turn a deep purple as they ripen. Depending on the weather, if there are any olives left on the trees by December, they’re all purple. We prefer to harvest them early, when they are still mostly green, for maximum flavour and health benefits.

Depending on the weather, an early harvest here in the West Peloponnese would be anywhere from mid-October to mid-November. It means that the flavours are a lot more intense, and the oil contains a lot more of those lovely polyphenols, making it even healthier for you. However, at this time of the season, we get a lot less oil per olive when pressing. Therefore, some farmers might prefer to wait longer for a later harvest, when the actual oil content of the olives is much higher.

Although the Peloponnese is one of Greece’s main olive-growing regions, olive groves here haven’t been industrialised and optimised for maximum production like in many areas of Spain, for example. Most of the groves here are still family-owned, with no more than a few hundred trees per person. Everyone their grandma has an olive grove around here and harvesting is often a family affair.

All the farms around us are basically micro-farms compared to industrialised olive cultivation. Many of the people we work with have no more than 50 trees. The groves are higgedly-piggedly, there is life everywhere. In high-intensity farming, trees are crammed together and planted for maximum production, without any concern for the tree itself or the web of life it’s a part of. This also means that there is an increased need for human input: watering as well as all kinds of chemicals. Small farms like the ones here might be less profitable short-term as they don’t squeeze the earth and trees to the max, but they are more resilient and sustainable in the long-run.

Because olive oil is not just a product, it’s a living food rooted in a time and a place. You can say that a generic supermarket olive oil sitting on the shelf has forgotten its identity and roots. And so have its consumers, who are far away from the land it comes from and know nothing about when it was produced. Extra virgin olive oil has a lifespan: it is harvested in the late autumn/early winter and matures over the following year, year-and-a-half, which is its maximum shelf life. So much happens to the nutrients and the flavour within that period. So yeah, harvest date is a crucial piece of info when it comes to evoo, so you know where and when your oil comes from and where in its lifespan it currently is.

Unlike in industrial-scale olive growing, where heavy machinery is used, unruly micro-groves like ours can only be harvested by hand-held devices. We use a variety of forks, rakes, as well as mechanised sticks to gently shake the olives off the trees and into the nets we spread underneath them. We stop the frantic picking from time to time and gather around to sift through a nice heap of olives and get the bigger branches out. This is the most satisfying part of the process for me. We then slide them into massive jute sacks that have been around since the beginning of time, they keep being reused every year.

At the end of each day, we drive to either Alexander’s or Sakis’ press to drop off the olives. Time and distance here are crucial, as once picked, the olives start fermenting, and we want to limit this process as it will increase the oil’s acidity. Distance from the press is another aspect where small farms win over industrial ones. In our area, every village has at least one, if not more olive presses. Basically you’re never more than a 10-min drive away from an olive press. Evenings are the busiest times here, as everyone brings their crop in and wants it processed immediately. So they’re often working into the night to have your oil ready by the next day. This whole process is so so hyperlocal, I think it’s kind of hard to imagine in our global world. There’s a real immediacy and familiarity to it all and it’s all based on trust.

Extra virgin olive oil is the only oil that’s actually nothing but the squeezed juice of the olive fruit: no chemical processes, no heating involved. In other words, the olive press is basically like a massive juicer. The olives are washed, most of the leaves are shaken out (some will still sneak in), some water is added to aid the extraction, the olives are mushed, then once to juice is squeezed, the water and the oil are separated, and voila: the fresh green stuff starts flowing from the tap at the other end. The remainder of the olive mass (pips and skins) can then be squeezed again for a lower-quality oil or used for heating. Nothing is wasted.

Soil, farming choices and weather are all super important when it comes to what makes a good olive oil. But rarely do we mention the HUGE significance of the olive press. If farming is the craft behind evoo, then pressing is definitely the art. The machinery, the temperature, the timings all affect the flavour and quality of the end product. We’ve been working closely with 3 presses and their masters, Sakis, Alexander and Anastasi - close relationships we’ve developed over the last 15 years. Each of these is a family enterprise, with the current owner’s parents still playing an active role in the running of the press. The knowledge is passed down generation to generation.

So extra virgin olive oil is nothing but cold-extracted olive juice. The olives are squeezed, the result lands in your bottle. No meddling, heating, blending - ideally, of course. Beyond being nothing more than a pressed juice, there are some more requirements: the oil has to have an acidity level below 0.8% and it has to be cold-pressed - 27 degrees is the industry standard. So extra virgin is by default always cold-pressed. Even though we’d get a lot more oil out of the fruit if you pressed at higher temperature, that’s something we don’t do as it’d ruin the quality of the product.

Unfiltered olive oil contains some sediment from the pip and skin of the olive fruit. It’s a bit like cloudy apple juice, retaining some extra bits of the fruit and its nutrients. Some people prefer to filter their oil after pressing - a process that often involves chemicals. Filtering does make the oil more stable and thus prolongs its shelf life, but that’s not relevant for us, as we always work harvest to harvest. Unfiltered is just how we roll, the way we like the oil, in its rawest, ‘realest’ form, where you have a real feel for it having come from a fruit. It makes for a super smooth, thick texture that is beautiful when drizzled on top of your hummus, but it also works perfectly well in your cooking.