What are tea grades?
The grade of tea describes the size of the leaf. The measurement system is broken into two classification hierarchies in black teas: whole leaf (OP) and broken leaf (BOP). An example of a high grade, whole leaf tea would be, FTGFOP. Green teas possess a different grading system. Overall, higher grades usually translate to greater use of the tea leaf. Thus, many high grades exhibit much larger tea leaf sizes than do lower grades. The dust or fannings found in most teabags exhibits a low grade broken leaf- the contents are fine fannings or dust cuts from the actual leaf. Large leaf and thus larger grade usually mean a higher quality tea. However, tea quality is not measured by the size of the leaf alone.
