Assam CTC

Good CTC pours a bright, coppery liquor and brews fast and strong without tasting flat or papery. Freshness matters more than for whole leaf: CTC has enormous surface area, so it goes stale quickly and old stock tastes dusty and dull rather than brisk. Grades run by particle size, from BP (broken pekoe) down through PF (pekoe fannings) to PD and dust, with the finer grades extracting faster and harder, useful for teabags but easy to over-brew. A little golden fleck in the granules points to more tip content and a slightly sweeter cup. The honest quality test is whether it stays brisk and bright under milk rather than turning bitter and metallic, which signals over-extraction or tired leaf.

Most Assam, and a huge share of the world's CTC, comes from the hot, humid, near-sea-level Brahmaputra (Assam) valley in northeast India, planted with the local large-leaf assamica cultivar. The same heat and humidity that give orthodox Assam its malt give CTC its punchy body. CTC processing runs withered leaf through toothed rollers that crush, tear and curl it into uniform granules, maximizing the broken surfaces that make extraction fast and color heavy. The lowland Assam estates and neighbouring regions turn out the bulk of it; quality within CTC is mostly a matter of estate, grade and freshness rather than terroir nuance.

Western and built for it: 2.5-3 g per 200 ml, 95-100°C (boiling is fine and intended), 2.5-3.5 minutes. It takes milk and sugar by design, and it is the base most masala chai is decocted from (simmered with milk and spices). CTC does not reward gongfu: the broken leaf dumps everything in the first steep and has little left for a second, so multi-infusion brewing is not its game.

Commodity loose-leaf CTC runs €5-12 (about $5-13) per 100 g, and is more honestly priced by the kilo. Named-estate or single-origin CTC reaches €12-20 (about $13-22) per 100 g. This is a value category: paying premium-orthodox prices for CTC is paying for the wrong thing.

Prices reviewed June 2026