When you take a walk around a tea garden, you will find that all the plants look similar. Despite plants looking alike, different flavors and tastes can be created. For that, different mechanisms are deployed. Now, you have a wide range of choices when you visit an online tea store. You can buy Assam tea perfectly once you get familiar with sorting and grading.

How Tea Manufacturing Started

Sorting is a type of mechanical process. People living during ancient times believed that sorting can be performed without implementing well-researched methods. Gradually, the mindset of people changed where they started using techniques required for manufacturing tea.

The number of tea drinkers in India is rising. A tea manufacturing company will always want that its blends fetch long-term recognition and good prices during auctions. Sorting allows identifying the best grades of tea and the prices are determined accordingly.

Why Sorting is Done

The main objective of sorting is to classify tea according to the size of the particles. During olden days, sorting was practiced to remove foreign matter and big leaves. People used to perform the sorting task manually. Small pincers were the best tools for eliminating long stalks.

Importance of Grading

The system of tea grading was developed for expressing the quality of tea leaves in discrete terms. The tea trading industry in the west introduced the grading system for enhancing the trade. Tea producing country like India uses this system to categorize different types of black tea.

Basis of Grading

The gradation of tea leaves depends on the amount of orange pekoe contained in leaves. It is the presence of unopened terminal leaf buds without golden tips in tea flushes. The categorization is made by noting the number of terminal buds on one or two adjacent leaves. After slow growth periods, the leaves containing young buds are plucked during a flush. The buds have golden tips. If the tea sample contains enough golden tips is termed as tippy before grading and this emerges as high-grade tea.

Grading system can be of many forms. In China, numbers are used for grading tea. 1 stands for the highest grade. The number is chosen between 1 and 9. The number is allotted based on the shape of the leaf. Grading is also done on the kind of the manufacturing process that has been carried out.

In Japan and Taiwan, grading terms range from extra choices to fannings. In India, some special terms are used for whole leaf teas like flowery orange pekoe, orange pekoe, tippy golden flowery orange pekoe, tippy golden flowery orange pekoe one, special finest tippy golden flowery orange pekoe one and much more.

Different Tea Grades

Grades of tea include whole leaf, broken leaf, dust and fanning. Each grade offers different sub grades. Broken leaf, fanning and dust are processed through leggcut and CTC manufacturing process. CTC grades that are in high demand include broken pekoe, broken pekoe souchong, broken orange pekoe, CTC pekoe fanning, pekoe dust, chur am oni dust and dust.

By this time you must have gained knowledge on sorting and grading of tea leaves. Now, you are ready to buy Assam tea online.