Reading a tea leaf: flushes, grades, and what to ignore

Tea packaging is full of acronyms that look like industry code because they are. Most of them describe leaf size and appearance rather than quality, and confusing the two is how people end up paying a premium for letters.

The grades, decoded

• OP — Orange Pekoe. Whole leaf, no bud. Nothing to do with oranges.
• FOP — Flowery OP. Whole leaf with some bud included.
• TGFOP — Tippy Golden FOP. A meaningful proportion of golden bud tip.
• FTGFOP — Finest TGFOP. More tip again. The industry joke is that it stands for "far too good for ordinary people."
• BOP — Broken OP. Deliberately broken leaf. Faster, stronger, less nuanced.
• CTC — Crush, Tear, Curl. Machine-processed pellets. What most Indian chai is made from.

A grade tells you leaf size and tip content. It does not tell you the garden was good, the year was good, or the tea was stored properly. A mediocre FTGFOP will lose to a well-made OP every time.

Flush matters more than grade

A flush is a harvest period, and it changes the tea more than almost anything else. First flush Darjeeling, picked in March, is green, sharp and floral. Second flush, picked in late May, is the famous one — rounder, fruitier, and carrying the muscatel note. Autumn flush is darker and quieter.

In the Nilgiris the equivalent event is the January frost. Cold nights slow the bush almost to a stop, and the leaf that comes off afterwards is denser and far more concentrated. It is a three-week window and a small fraction of the annual crop.

What actually ruins tea at home

• Water that is too hot. Green and white leaf scorch above 85°C. This is the number one error.
• Squeezing the leaf when straining. Every bit of bitterness you have ever tasted came from this.
• Storing it near the masala dabba. Tea absorbs everything around it.
• Buying more than three months of tea at a time.
• Leaving the tin open on the counter because it looks nice.