Where and how it is made
Yellow tea is made in a handful of counties, and almost nowhere else.
Yueyang in Hunan produces Junshan Yinzhen on an island in Dongting lake.
Mengding mountain in Sichuan produces Mengding Huangya.
Huoshan county in Anhui produces Huoshan Huangya.
A few other places make small amounts, and those rarely reach a shop outside China.
Total output is tiny next to green or red tea, and the gap is not a close one.
Most of what is made is sold inside China, usually as a gift rather than as a daily drink.
That shapes the market in ways a buyer outside it should understand.
Gift tea is bought on reputation, which pushes price up faster than it pushes quality up.
It is also bought in small amounts, which keeps packaging elaborate and leaf quality variable.
Production itself is the real constraint here, rather than demand.
The yellowing step ties up space and labour for a day or more on every batch.
A workshop can turn the same leaf into far more green tea in the same time.
That arithmetic, more than any romance, is why the category has stayed small.
Concentration
Concentration protects technique, and it also creates a single point of failure.
When nearly all output comes from three counties, a bad spring becomes a bad year for the whole category.
Hail on Mengding mountain or a wet March in Anhui moves prices everywhere.
Buyers experience this as availability rather than as weather.
Concentration also means the skills are held by very few people.
A workshop that loses its maker can lose the method along with them.
Several accounts describe exactly that happening during the twentieth century.
It is why the category needed reviving rather than simply expanding.
For a buyer, the practical effect is that provenance claims are genuinely checkable.
There are only three places worth asking about, and any seller should know which one theirs is.
A vague answer at province level usually means the leaf came from somewhere else entirely.
Ask for the county, and the conversation gets shorter and far more useful.
Few categories reward that one question as much as this one does.
Commodity versus premium
Inside such a small category, the two tiers still behave like separate businesses.
Commodity yellow tea is machine made, lightly yellowed, and sold by the bag.
It is drinkable, and it usually tastes like a soft green tea, which is close to what it is.
Premium yellow tea is small batch, hand finished, and priced on the maker and the picking date.
The difference shows up as sweetness, and as how long the leaf lasts across infusions.
A commodity yellow is spent by the 3rd infusion, while a good one is still sweet there.
Price tracks that difference imperfectly, because gift packaging adds a large fixed cost.
A beautifully boxed tin tells you nothing about which tier the leaf inside came from.
That is the largest single source of disappointment in this category.
Buy loose leaf in a plain bag from a specialist, and the money goes considerably further.
Then buy a small amount of the best the same seller has, and taste the two together.
That comparison teaches more in one afternoon than any price list will.
Most people find the middle of the range is where they actually want to be.
What to watch
The signal that matters is the spread between the everyday and the collectible tiers.
A wide spread means someone is still making the difficult version, and is being paid for it.
A flat spread means the category has settled into commodity production.
For yellow tea the spread is wide, which is unusual for something so small.
Watch the picking date next, since freshness decides this cup more than grade does.
Ask for the harvest year, and treat a reluctant answer as an answer in itself.
Then check the county, and prefer one that is named rather than merely implied.
Brew 4 g in a 120 ml gaiwan at 85 °C and give it about 60 seconds.
Three infusions will separate a properly yellowed tea from a green one.
Buy 50 g, drink it within 12 months, and do not keep any of it back for later.
The regional pages here cover each of the three counties in more depth.
What to watch is not the market, which no buyer can influence, but the label.
Two questions on a label settle most of what the market will never tell you.