Dust tea is a low-quality grade of fine grained black tea. Traditionally these were treated as the rejects of the manufacturing process in making high quality leaf tea like the Orange Pekoe. When leaves break or get crushed during the manufacturing process they are variously labelled as Broken Orange Pekoe, Fannings and dust based on the particle size. The smaller the particle, the lower the quality.

This traditionally low quality tea has however experienced a huge demand in the developing world in the last century as the practice of tea drinking became popular. Cheap tea stalls in India and the South Asian sub-continent, and Africa prefer dust tea because it is cheap and also produces a very strong brew - consequently more cups are obtained per measure of tea dust.