Tea leaf grading

The highest grades for Western and South Asian teas are referred to as "orange pekoe" (abbreviated as "OP"), and the lowest as "fannings" or "dust".

Pekoe tea grades are classified into various qualities, each determined by how many of the adjacent young leaves (two, one, or none) were picked along with the leaf buds.

These lower grades include fannings and dust, which are tiny remnants created in the sorting and crushing processes.

CTC teas, which consist of leaves rendered to uniform fannings by machine, have yet another grading system.

Also, if measured by volume, the larger sizes need more tea to produce the same strength beverage.

The grading system is based upon the size of processed and dried black tea leaves.

Although these are not the only factors used to determine quality, the size and wholeness of the leaves will have the greatest influence on the taste, clarity, and brewing time of the tea.

One explanation is that it is derived from the transliterated mispronunciation of the Amoy (Xiamen) dialect word for a Chinese tea known as "white down/hair" (白毫; Pe̍h-ōe-jī: pe̍h-ho).

[citation needed] Sir Thomas Lipton, the 19th-century British tea magnate, is widely credited with popularizing, if not inventing, the term "orange pekoe", which seems to have no Chinese precedent, for Western markets.

Traditionally these were treated as the rejects of the manufacturing process in making high-quality leaf tea like the orange pekoe.