Taiwan’s new Tea Assortment and Grading System (TAGs) combats fraudulent teas and educates consumers on the diversity and quality of Taiwanese teas. Photo credit: Taiwan Ministry of Agriculture Tea and Beverage Research Station.
For more than a decade, Taiwan’s tea industry has been searching for ways to improve transparency in domestic tea production and protect both local and international consumers from fraudulently labeled teas. The Taiwanese Tea Assortment and Grading System (TAGs) recently launched by the Taiwan Ministry of Agriculture Tea and Beverage Research Station (TBRS) offers a solution.
First created in 2019, TAGs seeks to improve traceability and pesticide monitoring for Taiwanese teas, focusing on production origin, product safety, and customer assurance. The TAGs system issues teas an overall quality score that considers factors like tea farm elevation and harvesting methods, presenting the information on a one-page digital score card that is easy for consumers to understand. Evaluations are conducted by a panel of professionally certified and carefully-vetted tea experts from government, industry, and academic backgrounds, who input scores into the TAGs system, which then generates a score card and assigns the teas one of three grades: Deluxe (特選, highest quality), Premium (精選, second highest quality), and Choice (優選, third highest quality). TAGs score cards provide ratings results for each tea’s taste, aroma, liquor color and appearance, and include tasting notes, the name and date of the evaluation, panel member names, and detailed photos of the tea leaves.
Following evaluation, teas are listed in an online directory that is organized into categories, with downloadable PDF files of the TAGs summary available in both Chinese and English versions. The directory can be searched based on tea category, production year, and evaluation outcome, and each directory entry includes company names and contact information of the tea producers. The website also provides additional resources like specialized flavor wheels for individual tea categories, and features an AI tea selection tool, which offers users tea suggestions based on the flavor profile the user selects. The official TAGs website is currently only available in Chinese, and the Taiwan Ministry of Agriculture has yet to announce plans for an English website.
Although TAGs has not yet achieved widespread use within Taiwan, the Tea and Beverage Research Station made great strides during 2024 in promoting the system, demonstrating its potential by using TAGs to evaluate and generate score cards for several contest-winning and organic teas, including organic teabags and popular classics like Dong Ding wulong, Alishan wulong, and Oriental Beauty. Following a demonstration of a TAGs evaluation of Oriental Beauty, TBRS Director Tsung-chen Su commented that, “Oriental Beauty is an important representative of Taiwanese tea, renowned for its red-orange liquor and unique aromas of ripe fruit and honey. Using TAGs to precisely analyze and digitally evaluate the tea’s flavors and generate score cards in both Chinese and English gives consumers a quick glimpse into the tea’s value, while also demonstrating the efforts that TBRS has devoted towards promoting modernization and transparency in tea. This [system] will offer Taiwanese teas a valuable resource in the international market.”
A sister system for evaluating Taiwanese coffee, called TCAGs, was also launched in 2024.
To learn more about TAGs, visit the official TAGs website at Tags.org.tw.