Licorice & Sloe Company

Waiter… There’s no Orange in this Pekoe.

By Bil Silliker | December 20, 2005

Shortly after we opened our teahouse a woman ordered a pot of Burnside Estate Flowery Orange Pekoe. A few minutes after we served it she came back up to the counter and asked if she got the right type of tea, as she couldn’t taste any orange. At times like this I have to restrain myself from laughing because I know that for the tea novice, myself including, there are things about tea that until being explained, can be a bit misleading. The funny part to that story is that there is no orange flavor in an orange pekoe. Funnier still were the two women the next day that raved about the orange flavor in the very same tea. I didn’t have the heart to tell them the truth, but I figured now might be a good time to share with my readers a bit about what orange pekoe really means.

Within the tea industry it is generally accepted that the orange is in regards to Holland’s House of Orange, which was the ruling house at the time that tea made it’s way to Europe by way of the Dutch.

Pekoe, which literally means “white hair,” is a word often associated with quality, but has also come to represent a particular size of leaf. So orange pekoe would be a certain size leaf of a quality tea, acceptable by the standards of the House of Orange.

This grading system has become a way of distinguishing quality leaves and includes several variations such as:

Pekoe (P) – shorter leaves than orange pekoe.

Flowery Orange Pekoe (FOP) – tea made from the end bud and first two leaves.

Golden Flowery Orange Pekoe (GFOP) – FOP with golden tips.

Broken Orange Pekoe (BOP) – OP that has been broken into smaller bits.

We have one tea at the shop with the classification SFTGFOP, which stands for Special Finest Tippy Golden Flowery Orange Pekoe. If you append the number 1 to that classification it would imply a better leaf grade still.

Only black teas from India, Sri Lanka, Africa and a few other countries are labeled using the system described above so don’t expect every tea to be labeled as some kind of pekoe. In fact, despite the word pekoe being derived from China’s pek-ho or bai-hao, China doesn’t use the system.

Okay… one last funny little tidbit. Shortly before writing this article I had a customer who actually tried to pronounce SFTGFOP… it came out sounding like… Siftgafop.