The Harney & Sons Guide to Tea - Michael Harney [35]
The British invented heated withering tables to speed up the evaporation necessary to soften tea leaves for rolling. They invented the very first rolling machines, one aptly called the Britannia. The machine is still in use in many Indian tea gardens today. These rolling machines precipitated the need for a new grading system. Chinese black teas had always consisted of whole leaves, but these new mechanical rollers generated all manner of leaf particles, leading to new variations in the brew. To distinguish one from another, British Legacy Teas, particularly those from the Indian tea regions of Darjeeling and Assam, still come with a string of letters and numbers attached to their names explaining their leaf size. These terms are so common, it’s worth attempting to define them. Let’s look at the tail on a typical top-quality Indian variety:
S: Special
F : Fancy
T: Tippy
G: Golden
F: Flowery / B: Broken
O: Orange
P: Pekoe
1: Number 1
As you can see, the region suffers from grade inflation. Only forty years ago, the best British Legacy Teas were labeled GFOP or BOP, for Golden Flowery Orange Pekoe and Broken Orange Pekoe, respectively. Increased competition over a shrinking market has led tea makers to tack on ever more modifiers in a misguided effort to stand out. Supreme, Special, Fancy, Tippy, Number 1, Golden, and Orange Pekoe are all meant to suggest little more than best-quality teas. Orange Pekoe is nearly meaningless; “Orange” stands for the Dutch Royal House of Orange and once indicated tea of a quality suitable for their monarchs. “Pekoe” is a mispronunciation of the Chinese words bai hao—bai meaning “white” and hao meaning “tippy” or “downy.” Pekoe may have once meant tippy teas, but the ancient word has long since lost its original meaning.
The two words to look for are Flowery or Broken. Flowery meant tippy in the era when British tea makers thought that the buds came from the flowers of the tea bush, before they realized the buds were incipient leaves. Today, Flowery mostly means a tea made up of the largest available particles. Broken means the tea consists of smaller, broken pieces. Generally speaking, the larger the leaf particles, the mellower and more sophisticated the tea.
Today, both Flowery and Broken teas are also called “Orthodox” teas, to distinguish them from “CTC” teas. “CTC” teas (so called for the “Crush, Tear, and Curl” steps of the production process) were introduced into the market in 1931, when Sir William McKercher invented the a machine that would “crush, tear, and curl” the fresh tea leaves in one fell swoop. This technique, the apogee of British tea innovation, revolutionized the world of tea production. Essentially a massive sieve, the machine extruded fresh leaves as tiny bright green pellets, then sent them on a conveyor belt beneath powerful blowers. This machine so hastened oxidation that the pellets turned dark brown within one hundred yards, in just under an hour. The result of this near instantaneous oxidation was a tea with extraordinary briskness and consistency. CTC teas have much less of the sort of internal variation that pure whole-leaf teas can provide, the kind of magical alteration that happens when one sips a fine tea or wine. CTC teas are so much cheaper and easier to produce, however, that they have almost entirely supplanted Orthodox teas. Today, CTC teas make up at least 95 percent of the worldwide tea market and are the primary ingredient in teabags. But because they are so blunt, I include only one CTC in this book. All the other British Legacy Teas here are Orthodox, and of those, almost all are Flowery.
In the British Legacy areas, the market for both Orthodox and CTC British Legacy Teas began to shrink dramatically in 1947 when the British Raj ended. The British began importing the bulk of their black tea from East Africa. South Asians took over ownership of the plantations, and British