What makes it yellow tea
Yellow tea is green tea plus one addition. After fixation, the still-warm and still-damp leaf is heaped and covered — men huang, 'sealed yellowing' — for hours or days, then finished. Held warm and enclosed, the leaf undergoes a slow non-enzymatic change that takes its colour towards yellow-olive and rounds off the sharp vegetal edge that fixation leaves behind. It is not oxidation, because fixation has already denatured the enzymes, and it is not fermentation, because no microbe is involved.
A short history, and why so little is made
Yellow tea has a long documented history in Chinese sources and a very small present. The economics are unforgiving: yellowing takes days of skilled attention, adds no weight to the finished tea, and produces a difference that is real but quiet. A producer who skips it has a saleable green tea and a shorter cycle. That pressure, more than any loss of knowledge, is why the category has contracted to a handful of names.
The three names worth knowing
Junshan Yinzhen, from a small island in Dongting Lake in Hunan, is the most celebrated and the most imitated. Meng Ding Huang Ya comes from Mount Meng in Sichuan and is yellowed more gently, keeping more freshness. Huoshan Huangya from Anhui is made in the largest quantity and is the practical place to start, because an honest example is affordable enough to buy alongside a green tea and taste the two together.
What it tastes like
Mellow, sweet and faintly grain-like or corn-like, with markedly less astringency than a comparable green tea and none of the fresh grassy sharpness. The difference from an unyellowed bud tea is subtle and shows most clearly in the finish. Anyone expecting a dramatic transformation will be disappointed; anyone tasting it beside a green tea from the same material will notice it immediately.
Brewing
Brew it as a delicate green tea: 75 to 85 °C, two to three minutes, and a tall glass if the leaf is bud-only, which is the traditional vessel and lets the buds be watched standing and sinking. Boiling water coarsens it and removes the roundness the yellowing was for. There is nothing exotic about the method — the difficulty in yellow tea is buying it, not brewing it.
Common misconceptions
That yellow tea is oxidised or fermented — it is neither. That it is simply an aged or lightly spoiled green tea. And, most practically, that the label assures the process: a great deal of tea carrying these names has never been yellowed at all. A description that does not mention smothering, wrapping or men huang is a strong signal that the step was skipped.