The English Olive Co. Newsletter
The last couple of months have been a combination of the most exciting, most challenging and most rewarding for us, but also historic, having produced and bottled our very first small batch of English Olive Oil.
Welcome to our first English Olive Club Newsletter and Happy New Year! Thank you for getting in touch with us over the last couple of months, and your kind interest in our English Olive Grove. The interest from yourselves and the media has been amazing, and many of you asked for a Newsletter or to join a mailing list, so here we are!
Our olive grove has provided many firsts for the UK, including the first ever import of an olive washing and pressing line. We needed a scale small enough to allow us to sensibly invest while the quantity of olives to harvest in the initial years may be quite small, but also large enough to be efficient and timely with our pressing going forward. To try and achieve the highest quality olive oil then pressing should take place as close to harvest as possible, ideally within 24 hours.
We chose a large boutique style olive press machine that can operate at a continuous flow of 100kg/hour, sourced from Turkey, and associated other equipment for the production line from Spain and Italy. Unfortunately, the delivery of this equipment got held up on the container ship, and arrived with us five weeks later than planned! During this time we lost over half of the olives to strong winds and frosts, and we didn’t have a great deal of olives in the first place with the trees only in their 3rd year of life!
The Kocamaz Mini Olive 100 washing and pressing line. David with Mr Serkan Kocamaz.
When we soon realised the fantastic interest in our English Olive Oil we tried to be as fair as possible with the limited quantity available. We soon changed bottling from the 500ml and 250ml bottles to just the 250ml bottles, and limited 1 bottle per customer. We released batches of availability to our website over a few weeks to also try and share out this limited supply. This did mean that more customers were able to purchase a bottle, but we are very aware that many of you were not able to purchase. We are very sorry about this, but we will continue to give the grove our best attention and with that we expect the quantity of olives and olive oil will increase every year, as the trees grow more and more. Our website shop still does have availability for the honey and olive leaf tea from our grove, and also a selection of gifts for the home.
Last month we were very fortunate to be approached by BBC Countryfile, to appear on their Sunday evening TV show, wanting us to show them how we sustainably grow food, manage water supply, farm with the environment, and also talk to them about olives! A full day of filming with presenter Adam Henson was cut down to about 10 minutes of TV time, which was aired on 7th December. Adam and his team were easy to get on with, and were very helpful to us who are TV novices! Other than Adam being told off a couple of times by the producer for chatting too much to the family and friends who were helping picking so olives, then it all went very well, and we were pleased with the final edit which we had no prior knowledge of.
Following BBC Countryfile, then I guess their research team passed on some of their findings to their colleagues at BBC News. They got in touch within a couple of days, and sent out a reporter and got some new footage, as well as using some of the previous filming, and soon our website traffic and Contact Us inbox was busy again when that aired. Newspapers and Radio stations soon picked up on this, and we featured in The Times, The Telegraph, The Sunday Express, Radio 4, LBC, Times Radio, Radio Lincolnshire, and some other local press. It was a busy time with journalists, and also a busy time for our website shop, for which we are very grateful to everyone.
While we are in the winter months with low temperatures then the olive grove will be quiet. We will soon be able to see what damage the unusually (for us) cold weather at the beginning of January has caused, and we will carry on to tie up blown over trees from the strong winds!
We will continue to do updates on our social media channels, and for those of you would like to follow us we are @TheEnglishOliveCo on Facebook or Instagram. When conditions allow we will be winter pruning the olive trees, and collecting some of the younger leaves, to be sent away and be dehydrated and packed, creating our next batch of olive leaf tea.
We intend to use this English Olive Club Newsletter to give you more of an insight into what we are up to, providing exclusive insights, and also giving you a heads up on what key events will be happening. This will include seasonal products and gifts being added to our website, such as a Valentines feature in February…..Olive You! You will also receive this Newsletter a few days before we share it on social media and post it on our website.
Thank you for all your support and your interest in The English Olive Co, and I look forward to updating you all in The English Olive Club next month.
Best wishes,
David