A separate system that borrows the same letters
CTC manufacture crushes, tears and curls withered leaf into small dense granules, so the whole output is small and the orthodox distinction between whole leaf and broken leaf does not apply. What is graded instead is granule size and density, sifted after manufacture in the same way orthodox tea is sifted, and the resulting codes reuse familiar letters with narrower meanings. The commonly encountered families are broken pekoe grades, pekoe fannings, pekoe dust and dust, usually abbreviated as BP, PF, PD and D, frequently with a numeral appended — BP1, PF1, PD, D1 — where the numeral is a producer or regional distinction within the grade rather than a universal rank. Sri Lankan, Indian, Kenyan and other African practices each have their own local conventions and additional designations, and they are not interchangeable. As with the orthodox letters, nobody external assigns these: the producer or the broker does, and the code is a specification of what will be in the chest. Read as trade shorthand between people who will taste before they buy, it works. Read as a consumer quality ladder, which is how it reaches shoppers on the rare occasions it reaches them at all, it does not.
What size means when everything is small
The differences are real and they are differences of degree along one axis: the smaller and denser the granule, the faster it extracts, the darker and brisker the liquor arrives, and the shorter the window between under- and over-brewed. A broken pekoe grade is at the coarser end and gives a slightly slower, slightly rounder cup that tolerates a longer steep. A dust grade is at the finest end, reaches full strength almost immediately, and is the material behind the strongest and fastest commercial preparations. Fannings sit between. The practical translation for anyone brewing an unfamiliar CTC is therefore mechanical: coarser code, longer steep and a coarser filter; finer code, shorter steep and a filter that will actually hold it. The choice between them is a choice about the drink rather than about quality, and different markets have settled on different points. The heavily brewed, milk-and-sugar styles of South Asia and parts of Africa favour the fast grades because the preparation depends on strength arriving quickly and standing up to dairy; a bagged tea for a Western supermarket sits somewhat coarser because the customer is dunking a bag in a mug for two minutes and colour arriving too fast reads as over-strong.
Why dust is not a rejection
The word does the most damage of any term in tea grading. A dust grade in CTC manufacture is not sweepings, not floor waste and not the residue of something better; it is the finest size fraction of the same production, separated deliberately because a market wants it. It commands its own price, it is bought by blenders and packers who know exactly what they are getting, and in several producing countries it is the grade the domestic market prefers. The same is true of the fannings grades. Reading them as inferior misses the whole point of sorting, which was to put material of consistent size into each package so that it brews predictably — consistency of extraction being a manufacturing requirement rather than a compromise. This matters for a buyer because it removes a false inference. A packet stating a dust grade is telling you how it will brew and nothing about how carefully the leaf was plucked or handled, and those questions were settled upstream in the field and the factory. Quality in CTC is decided by the leaf standard, the withering and the running of the machinery, and the grade code arrives afterwards to describe what came out.
The additional letters, and the regional variants
Beyond the four families a buyer may meet further designations: an S for a secondary or special grade, a G where a producer distinguishes a golden or tippy fraction even in CTC, and various local codes that a single origin uses and its neighbours do not. Kenyan practice, Indian practice and Sri Lankan practice have each accumulated their own, and the same three letters can mean slightly different things in two countries. There is also a genuine intermediate class produced by rotorvane and similar maceration devices used ahead of conventional oxidation, which yields something between orthodox broken grades and true CTC and is graded under whichever vocabulary the factory uses. The honest position for a buyer outside the trade is that these codes are worth recognising as a size-and-density specification, worth using to set a steep time, and not worth attempting to rank across origins. Where a code appears without a producing country attached it carries very little, in the same way an orthodox letter grade without a garden name carries very little. The country plus the code together is a usable pair; either alone is close to noise.
Where the codes actually appear
Rarely on anything a shopper picks up, which is the reason this vocabulary is so unfamiliar despite governing the majority of the world’s black tea. CTC grades are the language of auctions, brokers, blenders and packers, and by the time the tea reaches a supermarket it has been blended across several lots and grades to a specification and the carton says none of it. Where the codes do surface is on wholesale listings, on catering and bulk packs, on tea sold in producing countries for the domestic market, and increasingly on speciality listings from African and Indian producers selling directly. That last case is the interesting one, because a seller who states a CTC grade alongside a factory and a year is behaving like a speciality seller in a category the speciality trade has usually ignored, and there is genuinely good CTC being made. A buyer who has learned to read the code can use it there, which is a small piece of knowledge with a surprisingly specific payoff — it is one of the few places in tea where a technical vocabulary is available to a consumer at a low price point.
How to use a CTC grade well
Read it as a brewing instruction and then set it aside. If the code is at the fine end, dose lower and steep briefly, expect strength and colour immediately, and use a filter that will hold the particles rather than passing them into the cup. If it is at the coarse end, allow more time. Then look at the fields that predict character: the producing country and region, the factory where it is stated, the year, and whether the tea is intended for the milk-and-sugar preparations it is usually best at. And judge it against the job. A well-made CTC is a genuinely good thing at what it does — a strong mug with milk, a masala chai that has to stand up to spices and dairy, iced tea in quantity, a catering urn — and it is a poor purchase for tasting, for multiple infusions, or for exploring origin differences, which is the orthodox side of the catalogue. The failure mode that this page exists to head off is the same in both directions: paying a speciality price for tea that will be drowned in milk, and buying a fast dust grade in the hope of finding the flavours a speciality description promised.