Assam Tea Grades: What FTGFOP Actually Means

Somebody hands you a packet marked FTGFOP1 and a packet marked BOP and tells you the first is better tea. They have told you something about the leaves and nothing about what is in the cup.

What does FTGFOP mean?

FTGFOP stands for Finest Tippy Golden Flowery Orange Pekoe. It is a grade for orthodox black tea leaf, not a measure of quality in the cup. The letters describe leaf size and the proportion of golden tips, nothing else.

The system was built in colonial India and Ceylon to sort processed leaf by size and wholeness so it could be auctioned by description rather than by tasting every lot. It does that job well. It was never designed to rate flavour, and it still does not.

The orthodox grades, in order

Orthodox means the leaf is rolled rather than cut, keeping it more or less whole. Grades are built by stacking letters onto a base.

Grade	Full name	What it means
OP	Orange Pekoe	Whole leaf, long and wrapped, no tips to speak of
FOP	Flowery Orange Pekoe	Whole leaf with some bud content
GFOP	Golden Flowery Orange Pekoe	As FOP, with visible golden tips
TGFOP	Tippy Golden Flowery Orange Pekoe	A high proportion of golden tips. The common Assam whole leaf grade
FTGFOP	Finest Tippy Golden Flowery Orange Pekoe	A TGFOP the garden rates as its best
FTGFOP1	The same, with a 1	The garden’s top lot of that grade that season
BOP	Broken Orange Pekoe	Leaf broken during rolling. Faster, stronger brew
BPS	Broken Pekoe Souchong	Coarser broken grade
F	Fannings	Small particles, quick and strong
D	Dust	The finest particles. Teabag material

Two things that trip people up. “Orange” has nothing to do with the fruit, and the tea is not flavoured. And the 1 in FTGFOP1 is the garden’s own claim about its own lot, not an independent rating. Nobody audits it.

The CTC grades, which are a different system

CTC stands for crush, tear, curl. The leaf goes through toothed rollers, which ruptures the cell walls and produces small uniform granules that brew fast and strong. Most Assam tea by volume is CTC.

Grade	What it means
BP	Broken Pekoe. The largest CTC granule
BOP	Broken Orange Pekoe
BOPSM	Broken Orange Pekoe Small
OF	Orange Fannings
PD	Pekoe Dust
D	Dust

In CTC, smaller is not worse. PD and Dust brew the strongest and are what a good roadside tea stall usually uses, because they give colour and strength fast in boiled milk. Judging a CTC by the same instinct you apply to orthodox gets it exactly backwards.

Which of the two you want, and why the answer depends entirely on whether you take milk: CTC vs orthodox.

So what actually predicts how it tastes?

Four things, roughly in order:

1. The flush. Second flush Assam is malty. First flush is brisker and lighter. Autumn is softer. This matters more than any letter on the packet. See first flush, second flush.
2. The garden. Soil, elevation, shade and the person running the factory. Two gardens ten kilometres apart produce noticeably different tea.
3. How fresh it is. Black tea does not go off quickly, but a two year old packet has lost its top notes. The harvest date is more useful than the grade and far fewer packets carry it.
4. The grade. Last, and mostly because it tells you how to brew it rather than how good it is.

What to do with this at the shop counter

Ask for the flush and the garden. If the answer is vague, the grade on the packet will not rescue the purchase. A packet marked “Assam TGFOP” with no garden, no flush and no harvest date is a blend of whatever was cheap at auction, and it may still be perfectly good tea, but the grade was not what made it so.

What we have not verified

We have not tasted every grade listed above from a single garden in a single season, which is the only way to make a fair comparison. The descriptions of how each grade brews are from general practice and from tea people we have asked, not from a controlled tasting we ran ourselves.

Related reading

• CTC vs orthodox: which Assam tea you actually want
• How to brew Assam tea
• Second flush orthodox in the shop