The Assam Malt Authority
The independent guide to Assam, the malty black tea of the Brahmaputra valley.
The Ministry of Rooibos
The independent guide to rooibos, the red bush of the Cederberg.
The Order of the Seventh Steep
The independent guide to oolong: the partly oxidized teas, and how to brew them.
The Silver Needle Trust
The independent guide to white tea: the least processed leaf, and the craft of leaving it alone.
One thing worth your time from each chartered institution of the Federation.
The Gardens That Split India's Only Ape
A colonial railway line trapped three gibbon families on 150 hectares while 23 families lived just across the tracks, and it took fifteen years of tree-planting to grow them a way back across, a bridge a new electrification project now threatens to undo.
A Camera Can Now Grade How Fermented Your Tieguanyin Is
A 2026 machine-vision study of Tieguanyin fermentation never measured an objective truth in the leaf. Its "ground truth" was a two-of-three vote among tea masters, and the best a machine could do was match that committee 94.44 percent of the time.
A 1933 Tea Sample Still Matches Today's Cup
A tea sample sealed away in 1933 turned out to be chemically almost identical to what is sold today, and the same forgotten box solved a small mystery about a completely different plant.
Pekoe Is the Xiamen Word for a Silver Needle Bud's Down
The "Pekoe" on your tea box is a Xiamen word for white down, the same word that opens Silver Needle's own Chinese name, and the plain OP grade is defined by having none of it.
The United Federation of Tea Taxonomy is a small federation of independent, single-subject tea institutions, each chartered to one leaf and edited entirely on its own. The Federation maintains the taxonomy and no opinions; opinions are the business of the member institutions, which hold exactly one subject each and defend it at length. There is no shared newsroom and no house line. What the charter binds every member to is a method: say something true and useful that a knowledgeable tea drinker would respect, cite where it comes from, and publish nothing that cannot be sourced. The register below is the whole of the Federation's jurisdiction. Each institution keeps its own subject, its own voice, and its own hours.