Orange Pekoe - as a kind of tea?

That's a deception that's been practiced by many supermarket-type of tea companies for a long time. According an old M-W dictionary that was given to me, yes. The second definition is that it's a high quality India or Ceylon tea.

However, those in-the-know recognize it as nothing more than an indication of leaf size.

From

"One entry found for orange pekoe.

Main Entry: orange pekoe Function: noun : tea made from the smallest and youngest leaves of the shoot"

So, M-W has caught up to reality.

Nope. It's a tea size. But different leaf sizes can provide different flavors.

Reality is over-rated. Tea is not.

Have you seen Douglas's posts about the EB in Adagio's starter set? Have you ordered an IngenuiTea, yet? I did on Friday.

It's a corruption of the chinese "Bai Hao" meaning "White Tip" or "White Down" - which is believed to describe a new leaf that has just unfurled, and still has white fluff on it.

As for the 'orange' connotation it is variously believed to refer to either the dutch house of Orange (eg William of) and is merely an old brand name (like bandaid, styrofoam, etc), or to refer to an old chinese method of flavoring teas with oranges.

Neither of these assumptions are at all well substantiated. For whatever it's worth, it's been argued that the chinese have never used the Bai Hao term to refer to fermented leaves.

TGFOP, FTGFOP, etc, are part of the grading system for orange peoke tea usually attributed to Thomas Lipton. It's been suggested that he spent too much time in the sun because it's not well understood precisely what qualities are described when saying a given tea is 'golden' or 'flowery' - 'tippy' almost makes sense. I've been drinking Special Finest Tippy Golden Flowery Orange Peoke lately and i admit it's nice but i wonder precisely what it did to deserve the designation. I've heard there are yet more initials that show up from time to time.

A letter 'B' in there means broken - bits of leaves instead of whole leaves. these will generally brew up faster and stronger and possibly more bitter than whole leaf.

I hope i've managed to confuse you with some additional facts.

Facts I love; "statistics", I can usually do without! Thank you!!

I think I may have read it here when I was reading posts day in, day out, but I can't see "(F)TGFOP" without thinking, "(Far) Too Good For Other People" and keep adding on appropriate adjectives!

Thank you!

Resa

Yep. Rather disappointing.

Nope. Not yet. It's on my "to get" list.

It refers to leaf size found on the plant. The top two smallest leaves are Orange Pekoe, the next larger leaves Pekoe, and the largest leaves Souchong. Usually synonymous with Orange Pekoe is the term 'two leaves and a bud'. The term Flowery refers to presence of any bud and even that is graded. This is a leaf size grading system used by Britain and India. The sifted smaller grades from any tea production run will taste like the larger grades. So grading is just size and never represents quality.

Jim

Serendip wrote: ...kaboom...