Tea Key Terms

Your business' guide to understanding tea terms

When buying wholesale tea and products for your business, you may frequently run across industry-specific terms you might not be familiar with. Tea selling is easier - and you're more apt to provide a quality product for your customers - if you fully understand these terms. Tea terms may include descriptions for speciality teas, types of loose tea, regions tea is grown in, flavors and much more.

Understanding tea key terms will help you decipher the most commonly used tea-related jargon, focusing on tea-growing location, tea flavor and tea grading. Before you begin buying tea products wholesale, consider the following:

1. Where a tea is grown can greatly affect its quality and flavor.

2. Using terms for describing a tea's flavor can increase your business' sales.

3. Understanding terms tea distributors use for grading may help you better understand the sort of tea you're buying.

 

Understand terms used to describe tea location

When buying tea products wholesale, your tea distributor should indicate where their teas are grown in the world. Some of these place names, however, are unfamiliar to those not intimate with tea terms. For example, "Assam" tea is from northeastern India, "Darjeeling" is from Darjeeling India and "Nilgiri" is from south India. "Ceylon" and "Nuwara Eliya" are teas from Sri Lanka. "Congou" is a word used for northern China's whole leaf black teas. "Formosa" is a term used for describing tea grown in Taiwan.
Try: For more information about tea terms related to tea-growing location, check out Coffee Tea Warehouse, which covers geographic areas such as China, Russia, India and Africa. The United Kingdom Tea Council also has an interactive map allowing you to see all the major producers of tea and learn about tea in those regions.

Know the right terms to describe tea taste

When selling tea, there are many useful terms used to describe the flavor. Take advantage of these terms to help your customers understand what sort of tea they are purchasing. For example, "autumnal" describes the taste of teas grown during the fall, "cream" describes the cloudiness you might observe as the tea cools (the best teas have a bright cream), and "thin" means the tea has been fermented inadequately.
Try: For a list of tea terms related directly to flavor, see the Plymouth Tea Company. Teaosophy also has a comprehensive list of terms.

Learn about terms used by tea distributors to grade tea

Although there are no standard gradings for tea, some tea distributors and manufacturers use a tea grading system. For example "D" stands for "dust" (tiny pieces left in the tea after it is sifted), "F" stands for "fanning" (pieces of leaf slightly larger than dust), and "S" stands for "souchong" (the leaves from the bottom of the plant, which are the plant's largest).
Try: Imperial Tea Garden offers a beginner's guide on grading, while The Simple Leaf Tea provides more comprehensive information.

 

• Bear in mind that black tea, green tea and oolong tea are all produced from the same plant (the tea plant, "Camellia sinensis"). However, each is oxidized (or fermented) differently. Black tea is fully oxidized, oolong tea is semi-oxidized and green tea is un-oxidized.

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