Orthodox vs CTC Tea: What CTC Tea Is, How Each Is Made, and Which Is Best for Chai

“Orthodox” here simply means traditional. The aim is to keep the character of a particular garden, bush and season in the leaf, so that a Darjeeling tastes like a Darjeeling and this summer’s tea tastes different from last year’s. Peter Keen, writing for our blog, tied the word to “the traditional hand-plucked harvesting and processing by artisan methods,” in which the maker nurses the leaf to balance the hundreds of compounds that give it flavor, texture and aroma.

In orthodox processing, every batch of plucked leaf gets its own wither, roll and oxidation, set by trained tea makers to bring out the best flavors. The leaf is handled with care, because it is delicate and bruises and breaks easily. It is slow, skilled work, and the result is a whole or large broken leaf that unfolds in the cup. At Koilamari in Assam, the team told us orthodox making takes time “because of the attention given to extract the flavors from every leaf.”

The care starts in the field. In Darjeeling, a single kilogram of fresh leaf for an orthodox factory takes about 20,000 shoots, plucked by hand on slopes of 40 to 60 degrees, and labor is “60-70% of total incremental expenses.” That is why a fine orthodox tea costs more than a CTC made from the same hills.

Darjeeling’s prized teas are made this way, and so are the finest teas of Assam and the Nilgiris. Fine white, green and oolong teas are orthodox teas too, even though they skip some of the black tea steps. Indian oolongs, for example, follow the orthodox black tea template, with changes at the withering and oxidation stages.

Orthodox estates keep their history close. Chubwa, in Assam, one of the leading producers of fine orthodox teas, is among India’s oldest gardens: its first successful planting of tea saplings was in 1836, and its records go back to 1898. Its name joins two words, “chah” for tea and “bowa” for planting. At Chota Tingrai, founded in 1943, vintage rollers from the 1940s still work in the orthodox factory. When our team arrived there in 2016, we sat straight down for tea, and “this first cup of Orthodox Black Tea set all the right notes.”

For every step from bush to cup, see the parent guide, How tea is made.

Our own 2016 history of tea machinery spells it the same way, crush, tear and curl, “sometimes Crush is replaced by Cut, but the result is the same.” It is the method behind the strong, kadak cup of chai that so many of us grew up on.

Inside a CTC line

The heart of a CTC line is the rotorvane, a powerful machine that conditions and breaks up the leaf, followed by pairs of grooved, toothed cylinders rotating against each other. The crushers and tearers run at 600 to 1,200 revolutions a minute, and “rollers with sharp grooved cutters reshape it to look leaf-ish.” Broken pieces and dust are fed back into the flow, and the machines turn everything into granules of a uniform size.

The pellets start oxidizing at once and finish faster than whole leaf, and they brew a much darker, stronger cup. Peter Keen passed on one commentator’s comparison with Grape-Nuts cereal, which is neither grapes nor nuts but toasted breadcrumbs: “This is tea toast.”

Our tasters judge CTC leaf by its own signs. A browner look means a lighter cut, usually found in Assam teas, and a good CTC should have a “clean, grainy texture.” The dry leaf of our Kadak Chai is noted as blackish-brown nuggets, with specks of fiber showing through.

Built for scale

CTC was designed for scale. Developed in the 1930s and widely adopted in the decades after, it cut processing time and labor and turned tea into an everyday, affordable drink. It spread widely from the 1950s and reached India’s chai market in the 1960s, valued because it was economical and “could bring aroma, taste, and color within seconds of boiling.” It reached Kashmir around the 1970s, and by the end of 1985 “every stratum in Kashmir knew about CTC chai.”

Our own essays put it at roughly 80% of the world’s black tea. In India it is how most people drink tea every day: as chai, from loose CTC or tea bags. Our staff notes say it in one line: “India being a CTC drinking nation, tea is synonymous with chai.” The machines’ story is told in How tea is made.

Both styles come from the same plant. Black, white, oolong, green and CTC teas all come from one tea plant, and “almost always folks are very surprised” to hear it, as our founder, Kausshal Dugarr, says. The plant is Camellia sinensis; see What is tea?

That one choice, made between withering and oxidation, decides how the tea looks, tastes, brews and is used. Peter Keen called it the choice that “drives all the later processing steps,” and compared it to a butcher’s: a steak allows more options than ground beef, and “once the chopping and mincing starts, there’s no going back.” Our training decks boil it down to two lines: orthodox is leafy, with a wide range of flavors; CTC is granular, with a strong cup.

On the brew, one of our essays notes that a whole-leaf black tea takes 3 to 4 minutes to open up in water at or just below the boil, while a CTC tea bag gives a strong cup in about half a minute. Ian Bersten, writing for our blog, once brewed a CTC for 30 seconds in an Indonesian tea factory and was told by the taster, “Oh, you are making tea for drinking. I am making tea for tasting.” In his view, particle size, not time, is “the chief determinant of flavor extraction.”

Smaller pieces release their flavor faster and taste harsher; that is the trade-off at the heart of the two styles. The same guide sums up the taste: broken Assam teas are “strong but plain,” while whole-leaf Assams are “mellow, malty or ‘tippy.’” Even the dryness differs. Our 2023 bulk tea specification allows orthodox tea up to 10% moisture by weight and CTC less than 7%; these are receiving limits for bulk tea, not the dryness of the tea in your pack.

Orthodox Assam

Assam CTC

“Orthodox teas are rolled and CTC (base of your chai tea) is crushed,” as our procurement team put it. In the CTC method, “the leaves are fed into large machines where they are crushed, torn and curled to break them.” Each step, with the times from a batch we logged hour by hour, is explained in Tea making step by step; here are the two paths side by side.

How orthodox tea is made

1. Plucking. Fine orthodox tea is hand plucked, usually two leaves and a bud.
2. Withering. The leaf rests in long troughs for many hours, losing much of its water, until it goes soft.
3. Rolling. The leaf is rolled on a rolling table or by hand. This twists it and breaks its cells, so the juices meet the air, without chopping it up.
4. Oxidation. The rolled leaf darkens in a humidity- and temperature-controlled room for as long as the tea maker judges right.
5. Drying. Hot air stops oxidation and brings the moisture right down.
6. Sorting and grading. The finished tea is sieved and picked over, and graded by leaf size: whole leaf, brokens, fannings and dust.

Our tasting notes for a Goomtee spring tea record a wither of 12 to 14 hours and “a gentle twist for approx 7-10 mins” on the rolling tables, with only light oxidation. The Seeyok summer batch we followed in June 2021 was rolled for 40 minutes, with the pressure raised gradually.

How CTC tea is made

1. Plucking. CTC can use larger, more mature leaf than fine orthodox tea, and on big estates it is often plucked by machine.
2. Withering. A lighter wither than for orthodox tea, so the leaf keeps more of its moisture.
3. Crush, tear, curl. The rotorvane breaks the leaf up, then sets of toothed rollers macerate it into small, even pellets.
4. Oxidation. With so much broken surface, the pellets oxidize quickly.
5. Drying. Hot air dries the granules until crisp.
6. Sorting. The granules are sieved into grades by size: brokens, fannings and dust.

Either way, good tea is made fast once it leaves the bush. At Halmari, our team watched the day’s leaf weighed, made and tasted within about a day of plucking: “it only takes 24 hours for the tea to reach our cup,” and processing “starts almost immediately after it is plucked.” Our 2016 explainer summed up the machine side: leaves “are passed through a series of cylindrical rollers with serrated blades that crush, tear, and curl the tea into small, even-shaped pellets.”

Tea 101 puts it simply: “The best base for chai is the CTC tea,” and almost all chais use a strong CTC base, balanced by milk and lifted by spices. Our staff notes describe the ideal chai the same way: “strong, black CTC tea” with milk, sugar and spices.

With orthodox leaf you steep and stop; with CTC the boil is the point. A delicate whole-leaf tea is spoiled by a hard boil, while CTC granules are made to take it, and they give the color and body that milk needs. In 2015, despite all the teas we had on hand, most of our team would stop every day for “at least one cup of piping hot Assam CTC chai” from Joy-da, the chaiwallah on the ground floor of our office.

Freshness matters with CTC too. For Teabox Kadak Chai, “we source from the best tea gardens of Assam, making sure to choose premium CTCs. On selection, the teas arrive at our facility within 1 week,” Kausshal Dugarr wrote in January 2022.

A few practical tips

• Use about a teaspoon of CTC per cup. Our basic masala chai uses 1 teaspoon CTC, ¾ cup water and ½ cup full-cream milk, simmered about 8 minutes. The full recipe is in How to make masala chai at home.
• Match the grade to the spices. With small spices such as cardamom, use a smaller CTC grade like BP (broken pekoe), so tea and spice infuse at the same pace. More in The best tea for masala chai.
• Want it extra strong? That is karak (kadak) chai: more CTC and a longer boil.
• Prefer orthodox? A malty summer Assam makes a smoother, rounder milk tea. Steep it, do not boil it: 95–100°C for 4–5 minutes, then add milk. See Assam tea for milk tea.
• Or use both: in Kolkata it is common to see people having their own blend made at the local shop, such as 50 g of orthodox Darjeeling and 100 g of CTC with a few strands of saffron.

On caffeine: CTC and orthodox are both black tea, at about 50 mg a cup, though the real figure varies with the leaf, how much you use, the water temperature and how long it steeps or boils. More in Caffeine in tea, and on what makes a chai a chai in What is chai?