Tagged: ctc
A Tea's Grade Is a Size Code, Not a Quality Score
A tea's grade, OP, BOP, PD, Dust, is a sorting code, not a quality score, and it is the single biggest reason two kilos of tea from the same garden sell for very different prices at auction.
The Economics of the Tea Bag: How a Packing Machine, Not the Leaf, Built the Format Most of the World Drinks
The tea bag began as a shipping accident, but what made it cheap enough to dominate the world market was a German packing machine, and what still shapes its cost today is the material of the sachet itself.
Assam's Tea Economy
Assam alone grows more tea than any country except China and India itself, over half of India's total, out of three ownership models sharing one valley: private estates, a shrinking state corporation, and small growers who now supply more leaf than either.
How Black Tea Is Made: CTC and Orthodox
The canonical reference on the two ways black tea is manufactured, crush-tear-curl and orthodox, and why that one factory decision has sorted the world's tea economies into different positions in the market.
How the Tea Trade Works
The canonical map of the tea business, from garden to auction to shelf. What tea is as a commodity, the path the leaf takes to the cup, how its price is set, and where the money along the way actually ends up.
India's Tea Industry
The world's second-largest tea producer is also its largest tea-drinking nation, and the two facts explain most of the rest. How a colonial plantation crop became four distinct growing regions, a smallholder majority the estates did not see coming, an auction system half its own producers now want to escape, and a trade caught between a record export year and three separate fights over access.