"One of our best Tippy Grade offerings," Morawaka says of this Flowery Broken Orange Pekoe Fannings grade Low-Grown Ruhuna or Ceylon tea. This tea presents larger leaf cuts with a fair amount of tips. Not what we've come to think of as "fannings", to be sure, but that's what the grower calls this grade. Produces a lighter liquor with a rich aroma and flavor. Using the standard 3g (1 teaspoon) tea leaves to 8oz boiling water, a 7.0oz (198.5grams) box of Morawaka FBOPF yields about 66 cups of tea at 17¢ per cup!
Note: "Flowery" does not connote flowers in the tea.
Grading of teas refers strictly to appearance: size and shape; grades do
not refer to taste, smell, or quality (except for Taiwan, which does grade also by these things, and has many more grades than most other countries). While
there is no universal standard for grading teas, stemming from long ago
when isolated tea gardens each developed their own grading standards, in
general the term "Flowery" tends to connote a slightly broader leaf,
more open, than a simply OP leaf, and which has a crimped appearance
that reminds one of a crushed flower petal. "Flowery" may also come from
an era when it was believed the "bud" in the expression "two leaves and
a bud", the most common configuration in which tea is plucked, came
from the tea plant's flower, before it was understood that the "bud" is
actually a leaf that has not unfurled yet. And so, "Flowery" may have
started out meaning what is now called "tippy".
