Lamb meat comes from young animals. In the sheep grading system they are ‘A’ grade, and to achieve that grading they should not have real teeth yet. As soon as they get two real teeth they are classified ‘AB’ and are no longer lambs. The meat from these older animals is known as mutton. After ‘AB’ the next rating is ‘B’ and then ‘C’. These are all mutton. According to the definition then, all lamb is ‘A’ grade as anything else is classified as mutton.

Lambs are usually slaughtered somewhere between 3 and 7 months of age, and the average carcass you see at the butcher weighs between 16 and 24 kilograms. In general, the younger it is slaughtered, the less it weighs.

Those purple stamps that mark the grade on the carcass don’t use just one A on a lamb but rather a long vertical line of three As. Some people mistakenly call this ‘triple A’ lamb but there is no such thing. This line of AAA marking simply means it is an A grade animal – in other words it is a lamb. The only other rating refers to the covering of fat on the carcass. A0 means that the meat contains no fat and A1 means that it has very little fat. A6 on the other hand means that the meat contains a lot of fat.