Cold Press Olive Oil with The MONK

There are many stages to the cleaning of the olives which start on the fields.  Here we seperate the olives from the branches and the leaves.  We do by hand then use a machine.  Of course, it doesn’t take everything away so therefore this process will continue in the factory!

We dump the cartons full of olives in the machine which will be taken through a water cleaning tube where it pushes the olives and leaves through in a circular forward movement.  Then it pulls only the olives up another tube and drops into a bowl where it smashes the olives.  By this point the cleaning is done and should be no leaves or branches for the best olive oil.  Also, a big factor is that it is all done with no heat exhaust.  Therefore, it doesn’t kill any of the nutrients from the olives.

Now that the olives have been smashed it is a light green paste.  Here we spread it on a circular flat wool fabric.  They are put one on top of the other to be taken to the press!  Here the olive paste is put under the press to undergo a huge amount of press to extract all the olive oil.  The olive oil will pour into a bucket that we place underneath.

Now to things come out, some black water and the olive oil. It is necessary to let it sit for a couple of hours while they separate on their own.  The water will sink to the bottom and the only to the top.  Now we pour the olive oil into their bottle, ready to be used!

After this whole process, we obviously need to see if what we collected was good right?
How do we do this?

Well we will test the acidity of the olive oil.  Here you can find how we do this! Olive oil acidity.

Every batch varies and it depends on a lot of things like:

• how ripe the olives are when collected
• how the olive trees were taken care of
• how soon after the olives were pressed after coming off the tree
• how the olives are press

Usually The Monk Olive oil comes to about .03 acidity! This is considered very good olive oil.