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| Filling The Cans |
Graber olives are justly famous for being big, juicy and delicious. The company was started in 1894 and is still owned by the same family, which prides itself on using only tree-ripened olives. I've always liked black olives, but I never knew that those "ripe" olives are picked green and then oxidized to give them the black color. The Grabers pick olives after they have turned red, so many of their olives still have a reddish tinge to them.
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| Packer |
That Saturday was the first canning day of the season. I would have liked to have been able to watch them grade the olives for size, but that process had already been done and they had soaked in brine in big vats, so now they were ready for the canning process. Stacks of empty cans were loaded into the conveyer mechanism which moved them down to the filling wheel, where they were carried around and the ladies rapidly loaded each can. Sometimes the mechanism would get stuck and the lady sitting next to it would give it a whack to get the cans moving again.
Then the cans were routed into the packer where the lids were clamped on; I was fascinated by the steam billowing up from the machinery during this process. Most of the equipment dates from the 1930s, but it still does the job.
Then the cans are stacked up into racks and loaded into the boiler where they will be heated for about an hour.
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| Loading the Boiler |
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| Is This A Cool Piece of Machinery, or What? |
Later the racks of cans are stacked out in the breezeway to cool.
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| Cooling Cans |
It's hard to believe that this whole process takes place in a residential neighborhood; if you don't know it's there, you could easily drive right past and miss it altogether.
I'm glad we went, it's a fascinating process to watch. Plus we bought several cans of olives. Yum.
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