On just about every box of mass-market tea bags you buy it says made from "orange pekoe and pekoe cut black tea". I have always thought this was the species of tea bush that the leaves come from. WRONG! All true tea (i.e. not herb tea) comes from one species of plant; the camellia sinensis. The terms orange pekoe and pekoe refer to the size of the tea leaves! Can you freaking believe it? You can go here for a quick read on what all of the different terms are. Read the excerpts from books about tea on the page. Apparently Sir Thomas Lipton did not know anything about tea. He was just a good marketer. Him getting the American public to associate good tea with orange pekoe was like P.T. Barnum getting people excited about seeing the "great egress".

There are two scales for grading tea. One scale is for unbroken leaves, and the other is for broken leaves. Orange pekoe is an unbroken grade, but it is only three from the bottom.

I also thought that the difference between green tea and dark tea was that one was roasted like coffee and the other was not. Wrong again. Close, but wrong. The tea becomes dark by being fermented! I still think that black tea has been roasted.