Tea
Tea Grades Describe Leaf Size, Not Quality
The long strings of letters on wholesale tea listings encode particle size and leaf position, and reading them as a quality ranking leads to consistent misjudgement.
Tea sold in bulk carries grading codes that look like quality marks and are frequently sold as such. They describe the physical form of the leaf, and only indirectly anything about how it tastes.
The system sorts by size and wholeness
After processing, leaf is passed over meshes that separate it into whole leaf, broken leaf, fannings and dust, in descending order of particle size.
Each of those categories is then subdivided according to whether buds are present and how the leaf was picked and rolled.
The resulting codes are a sorting record. They tell a buyer what will arrive in the sack and how it will behave in a machine or a bag.
Size predicts extraction, not merit
Smaller particles extract faster and give a stronger, darker cup in less time, which is exactly what a bagged product needs.
Whole leaf extracts slower and more gradually, which suits a pot and multiple infusions but performs poorly in a two-minute mug.
Neither is better in the abstract. They are inputs suited to different uses, and a producer choosing to break leaf is making a commercial decision rather than admitting failure.
Bud content is a real signal, within limits
Grades noting tips or golden tips do indicate a higher proportion of buds, which carry more amino acids and less of the coarse material found in older leaf.
That correlates loosely with a sweeter, softer cup, so the signal is not meaningless. It is simply narrower than it is usually taken to be.
Plenty of excellent tea contains few buds, and bud-heavy tea from an indifferent garden is still indifferent tea.
The codes are not universal
Grading conventions differ between producing regions, and several major tea countries do not use the letter system at all, classifying instead by style, origin or picking standard.
Even where the letters are used, application varies between estates and there is no external authority enforcing consistency.
Comparing a grade across two countries is therefore closer to comparing two unrelated inventory systems than to comparing two scores.
What to read instead
Origin, harvest season, cultivar and processing style carry more information about flavour than any grade code does.
For a drinker, the practical use of the grade is to predict brewing behaviour: expect fast strong extraction from small particles and a longer, more layered draw from whole leaf.
Used that way it is genuinely useful information, and considerably less misleading than treating an extra letter as an extra star.
