What does first cold press mean?
The olives are crushed once, without heat. Heat lifts the yield and flattens everything worth tasting, so we do not use it. There is no second press. What comes out the first time is what goes in the bottle.
Half the phrase is a fossil. It comes from mats and hydraulic presses, which really did press a second time to wring out what the first had missed.
Modern mills use a centrifuge. There is only one extraction. On most labels today, "first press" describes equipment nobody in the building owns.
"Cold" is the half that still means something. The European standard caps the paste below 27°C for oil sold as cold extracted.
Heat is tempting because it raises the yield. It also drives off the aromatics and pushes free acidity up, which is the opposite of what you are paying for.
That number is measurable, which is why we publish it per batch rather than asking to be believed.
We publish the numbers.
Free acidity, peroxide value, the date it was picked and the date it was bottled. Every batch we bring into the United States.
The lab sheet