Yellow Tea Buying Guide

Yellow tea is the most awkward category for this question, because it is expensive, scarce and almost entirely a drink-now tea.

It is scarce, expensive, and made by a step almost nobody has heard of, which makes it a good story as well as a good cup.

Yellow tea is the rarest of the seven categories and production is tiny. Demand from outside China has grown far faster than supply.

The defining step is men huang (闷黄), a slow damp piling that removes the grassy edge of a green tea and leaves something rounder.

Yellow tea is the category where a specialist shop is close to essential, because much of what is sold is not yellow tea.

Yellow tea is the most expensive category per gram and the hardest to buy well, which makes value a real question rather than a theoretical one.