Tea Grades Explained: What Orange Pekoe, FTGFOP and BOP Really Mean

Grading helps buyers judge a tea’s style and value at a glance, and it began as a way to classify teas for sale at the auctions that long dominated the Indian tea trade. Peter Keen, writing for us, dates the system to the late 1800s, when it emerged “to classify Indian and Ceylon teas for auction.” The Calcutta tea auctions themselves began in 1861.

Once the leaf has been rolled, oxidized and dried (see How tea is made), it goes over vibrating trays and sieves of different mesh sizes. Each pile is graded on the size of the leaf, the kinds of leaf in the mix, the sheen or “bloom” on it, and, when tasted, the aroma, taste and color of the liquor. There are more than thirty grades in all.

Our own staff training is blunt about what a grade does not do. Grading terms “don’t refer to sensory aspects of the tea”: they do not describe its body, texture or aroma, but “give information about the appearance of the leaf that may be helpful when buying teas from a catalogue.” The same training teaches that a word like “Special” in a code usually signals a high-quality lot, while a code with no “Special” or “Flowery” in it normally means a plainer tea.

There is no single world system. The codes in this guide are used for teas from India, Sri Lanka, Africa, Indonesia and Malaysia; China, Japan, Vietnam and South Korea grade their teas in their own ways. In India the system applies mainly to orthodox black teas and some green teas. CTC tea, the granular kind used for most chai, has a separate set of grades, covered in CTC tea grades.

Broadly, tea divides into four grade groups: dust, fannings, brokens and whole leaf. Dust is the lowest grade and whole leaf the highest.

What is tea gradingTeabox Masterclass · 2:52 Different grades of teaTeabox Masterclass · 7:56

On the bush, the same words name the parts of the shoot: Tea 101 calls the bud the flowery pekoe, the first leaf the orange pekoe and the second leaf the pekoe, the part pluckers take when they pick “two leaves and a bud.”

Where the words came from is debated. “Orange” is often said to refer to the Dutch House of Orange-Nassau, since the Dutch dominated the early European tea trade and the word suggested a royal seal of approval. Peter Keen put it the same way for us: the name was “used by traders and growers to imply a Royal Warrant certification of quality,” and it was the Dutch who “created the orange pekoe leaf grading system.”

Another common explanation is the coppery color of well-made leaf. “Pekoe” is usually traced to a Chinese term for the fine white down on young buds. Whatever its origin, orange pekoe became the base word of the whole leaf grading system, and every longer code is built on it.

Keen also had fun with the brands that print it proudly: in essence, he wrote, it means “just average black tea leaf.” In his beginner’s guide to Assam teas, he said OP “has nothing to do with orange anything, nor is it an indicator of a superior tea. It stands for real leaf, as contrasted with the bits and pieces.”

The vocabulary is old. A grower’s note from Australia in 1901, quoted on our blog, found “the broken Orange Pekoe was very choice, fresh and flavory; the Pekoe and Souchong also being of a good useful character.” It also lives on as a regional label: the winter teas of the Nilgiris are known around the world as the “Nilgiri orange pekoes.”

Many people know orange pekoe from supermarket boxes that print it as if it were a flavor or a type of tea. It is neither. For the names of each part of the shoot and the bushes they grow on, see Chinary, Assam and clonal tea plants.

A long code from an ordinary garden can be outshone by a modest one from a great garden in a good season. Grades are “about the size and cut of the leaf, rather than quality,” as a 2015 piece on our blog put it: “don’t let these symbols prejudice your palate.” Our Darjeeling beginner’s guide agrees: the grade “is not a measure of the quality of the tea itself.” Peter Keen compared grades to the Prime and Choice grades of beef: “The quality of the cooked steak still depends on the chef.”

Our own catalog shows why. Of the teas we currently list with a whole leaf grade, about half (36 of 69) carry FTGFOP1, from spring Chinarys to summer muscatels. Castleton Summer Muscatel, from the garden where the word “muscatel” was first used, is graded FTGFOP1, while Giddapahar Summer Muscatel is SFTGFOP1. That does not make the Castleton the lesser tea; its grade simply records its leaf. The Castleton lot that set a world auction record in 1992 was graded FTGFOP1 too, not SFTGFOP1.

We train our own staff the same way. A question in our employee tea quiz asks which grade gives more flavor in the cup; the right answer is simply “Whole Leaf,” and “Whole Leaf SFTGFOP1” is marked wrong. The group of the grade matters more than the longest code.

As a rule:

• Whole leaf grades give more aroma and nuance, especially with plenty of buds. They cost more and are best drunk plain or with a splash of milk.
• Broken grades, fannings and dust give strength and briskness in a hurry. They suit strong breakfast cups and chai.
• Grading is not fully standardized. Producers apply the same code a little differently, and a grade says nothing about the estate, the flush or the skill of the tea maker.

That last point is the one our founder, Kausshal Dugarr, returns to: “The early tastings give a clear idea of the weather in the area. At a deeper level the personality of the maker comes through.” How professional tasters judge a tea, beyond its grade, is in How to taste tea like an expert.