"Orange Pekoe" as an advertising slogan

[mbanu]

In America, the "orange pekoe" advertising campaigns by companies such as Lipton and Tetley helped transform the nation from green and oolong drinkers into black tea drinkers almost exclusively, but there is not much information out there on it.

When people try to look, most info goes back to the fuzzy origins of the term as a grade for tea, rather than how it was used in practice, so I thought this might be a good place to post about what the tea was and what it became -- maybe we will even get to the bottom of the original name?

[belewfripp]

Sounds like fun to me. I enjoy the historical/advertisement/catalog posts you've made in various threads, @mbanu. Kind of like The Institute of Official Cheer filtered through a Chinese/tea lens.

It's interesting from an educational perspective (and provides windows into Chinese and American tea marketing). I have done a tiny little bit of looking into the origin of orange pekoe myself, nothing more than what many already know, I would guess - that the name may be a botched foreign pronunciation of a Chinese tea grade as spoken in a particular dialect of Chinese. For practical purposes, it doesn't seem to mean much in the U.S. anymore, but then locations are just advertising slogans in this country - witness Vermont white cheddar (as if the absence of annatto food coloring were something special).

[mbanu]

This was a 1925 ad for a tea-tin manufacturer. A few interesting things going on.

It used a Chinese-style font for the word tea even though the tea was an Indian/Ceylon blend. Nowadays such a tea would have used a Sanskrit-style font, but I imagine back then the appeal of the tea was not that it was Indian or Sri Lankan, but rather that it was imported from overseas.

The advertiser points out that often it was "quality" in a social status way that was being bought and sold under the pretense of quality of the tea itself, so a sufficiently luxurious-looking tin helped sales regardless of the tea inside. (Given the time, however, the tea inside probably looked quite nice also, similar to low-grown Sri-Lankan teas today.)

The fact that it is orange pekoe tea is given more label-space than the manufacturer or origin of the tea.

*Edit: Also a tin itself, looking a bit tired but in reasonable shape for its age.

[mbanu]

chase-sanborn-orange-pekoe.jpeg (343.71 KiB) Viewed 4110 times

Someone might assume from this ad that it was advertising a Japanese tea, or maybe, poorly, a Chinese tea. However, this is a 1910s ad for a Ceylon tea!

ceylon-tea.jpg (117.69 KiB) Viewed 4110 times

As far as I can tell, this is where the term was born -- during the 1900s push to sell China-bush Ceylon teas as replacements for the popular Chinese black teas. Orange Pekoe as a term for a type of Chinese scented tea was known by tea-traders, but it was not very popular in America and was mostly used in small quantities by tea-blenders. Asked about Orange Pekoe in 1908 during a tariff hearing, the New York tea broker George C. Chowell said, "The Orange Pekoe tea is hardly a tea. This is more of a manufactured leaf that is used for flavoring purposes... We see very little of it in this country."

It was also known as a grade of British tea, but again mostly as an industry term. Retailer's manuals, such as the 1903 Tea Hints for Retailers, would warn about mixing the two up.

orange-pekoe-1903.jpg (302.92 KiB) Viewed 4110 times

The consumer, however, was not a retailer.