Like the wine ratings scale, tea has grade levels. If you see random letter groupings at the tea shop you know you’ve got a good supplier that understands higher quality teas. The different tea grades are (from lowest to highest):
Dust: Break open your average lipton tea bag and you’ll see what this means.
Fannings: Broken leaves.
P – Pekoe: Attributed origin is words meaning “white” & “down” from a Chinese dialect. This is whole leaf tea.
OP – Orange Pekoe: A slightly misleading name. This is your basic medium grade black tea. It’s not orange flavored or orange colored. The tea is named after Dutch royalty, the House of Orange. Paving the way for modern marketing, the Dutch East India Company wanted to associate their tea with the celebrity of the royal family, so they added “orange” to “pekoe.” Their strategy worked and made orange pekoe tea very popular. Like I said, it’s misleading.
FOP – Flowery Orange Pekoe: Only the bud and top two leaves from each branch. The only way to get this? By hand.
GFOP – Golden Flowery Orange Pekoe: Certain leaves have a golden tip indicating a higher quality.
TGFOP – Tippy Golden Flowery Orange Pekoe: Higher proportion of tips.
FTGFOP – Finest Tippy Golden Flowery Orange Pekoe.
SFTGFOP—Special Finest Tippy Golden Flowery Orange Pekoe.
Some say that “FTGFOP” stands for “Far Too Good For Ordinary People”.
Thanks Kitty! This is so interesting! I have actually avoided trying orange pekoe because i thought it had orange flavor! Now I have a new tea to try!
[…] jut to Darjeelings) and 13 pages of Chinese tea to choose from. If you’re looking for high grade teas with lots of letters this this looks like a great place to shop. However, they must be purists because they don’t […]
[…] I knew we had good teas when the packages carried the letters for the grades of tea and where it was grown. If you’d like to know more about the letter codes click here. […]
[…] made of small, broken bits of tea leaves called fannings or dust. Here is a previous post on the grades of tea if you’d like to read […]
[…] Taiwan, Kenya, and Malawi. They have rare teas, reserve teas, and even tea with letters! (Click here if you’d like to learn more about the different grades of tea.) I was so in my element with […]