Did i buy good tea?

[Max]

I came back from a trip to Sri Lanka today. I got the impression that i bought good tea
but when i google the brands i purchased i found out nothing. Im a complete newbie
when it comes to tea. Please help a future (i hope ) tea entusiast out!

Special Selcted Seven Hills High Grown Tea B.O.P
Mackwoods Broken Orange Fannings

Are any of these teas any good?

[peter]

First of all, welcome to Tea Trade Max!

The brands there are likely the names of the estates that the teas come from. The other parts of the tea names are grades of tea. BOP is Broken Orange Pekoe and Broken Orange Fannings is also known as BOF.

In the grading scale, these are on the lower end. However, it is important to know that the grading scale actually has little to do with quality (though it can be taken as an indicator) – it only has to do with leaf size of the dry leaf.

When tea is sorted, they put it into a stack of sieves, the largest leaves stay at the top and the smallest pieces fall to the bottom. Fannings (also called dust) is the same stuff you find in common tea bags. BOP is a step up the scale, but the leaf pieces tend to be small.

Fannings are going to brew very fast, I’ve had fannings in the house and needed to brew them in paper tea filters because they are so fine and rarely brew them for more than a minute or so. Also, while many teas can be brewed more than once, these teas are only going to withstand one steeping, YMMV.

There are plenty of folks who might have some more to say on this and I invite @lochantea @liberteas and @sirwilliamoftheleaf to chime in about this. They’ve plenty more knowledge than I will ever have about understanding what you’ve purchased.

[Jackie]

Oh, this is interesting Max. I think they are Sri Lankan tea companies. I agree with @Peter because one of them is fannings, it’s not quite high end stuff – but hey it’s straight from Sri Lanka to your cup. Sounds awesome.
Here’s a link to Mackwoods: http://mackwoodstea.com/family.asp
and here to Seven Hills, though this particular link isn’t very interesting I think: http://wikimapia.org/5061100/Seven-Hills-Tea-Centre
Would love to hear more about your trip to Sri Lanka? Did you see any tea plantations at all? Even if not, trip posts like that are interesting to other tea drinkers too.

[Max]

Thanks for the replys!

I did not visit any plantation, but i visited a tea factory and watched all steps in that process ( have some photos if anyone is interested) It was a low end government owned factory, so the tea there wasn’t considered to be a top product.

I sampled the tea shortly after i posted here (the highgrowing one from nuwara eliya)
and yes, the old teabags from Lipton will get the boot soon. Im glad that i liked it , i bough1 1KG of it
for a small coin 🙂 10 usd.

So, which tea is recommended for a starter like i ? Heard lots about Ooling but would like some input
from you experienced guys.

[Xavier]

Welcome.

Before knowing what tea is good to “start”, could you tell us what kind of food/stuff you like? Spicy? Sweet? …

[Author]

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