Short-term: hold the freshness
Short-term storage is the only sensible plan for yellow tea. The character that defines the category, a soft corn-like sweetness produced by the men huang step, is delicate and it fades rather than deepens.
The environment is cold or cool and dry. A fridge at 0 to 5 degrees is genuinely useful here, with the tin sealed inside a bag. A cool interior cupboard is the alternative if you drink it fast enough.
The timeline is six to eighteen months. Inside that window a well-kept yellow tea is what you paid for. Outside it, you are drinking something that has lost the reason it was expensive.
Buy small. This is the single most useful rule for the category. A 50 or 100 gram lot, drunk over a few months, will beat a large lot every time, however well you store the large one.
Long-term: change the goal
Long-term storage for yellow tea is not a real category, and it is worth being blunt about it. Yellow tea has no ageing tradition comparable to white or dark tea, and men huang is a brief damp-heat step, not a fermentation.
That means there is no microbial population left in the leaf to drive long-term change. A cake put away for ten years will not become something new. It will become an old, flat version of what it was.
You will occasionally see old yellow tea for sale, and some of it is pleasant. But there is no accumulated knowledge about how it develops, and almost nobody can tell you what a genuinely aged yellow tea should taste like.
That combination makes old yellow tea very easy to fake. An age claim on a yellow tea is close to unfalsifiable, so pay for the tea in the cup rather than for the year on the wrapper.
Put plainly, if a seller is pitching you old yellow tea on the strength of its age, that is a reason to be cautious rather than interested.
Which is your case
Which case you are in is almost always the same: you are a short-term storer. Yellow tea is produced in small quantities, sold at a premium, and meant to be drunk in its first year.
The only scenario where that changes is if you deliberately want to run an experiment. In that case buy one small lot, seal it, date it, and plan to open it in two years.
Compare it then against a fresh sample of the same tea if you can still get one. That is the only way to know whether you like what it became, and for yellow tea the answer is usually no.
One thing to check first: make sure what you have is actually yellow tea. If it tastes grassy and sharp rather than soft and sweet, you may have been sold a green tea, and no storage plan fixes that.
The two names worth knowing are Junshan Yinzhen from Hunan and Mengding Huangya from Sichuan. Both come from single growing areas with limited output, and both are at their best in the first year.
Given that the tea is expensive and the window is short, the sensible pattern is to buy twice a season rather than once a year. Two small purchases of fresh tea beat one large purchase that declines before you finish it.
A quick decision rule
The rule for yellow tea is the shortest one here. Buy 50 to 100 grams, store it cold and sealed, and drink it within the year.
Never buy in bulk because the price per gram looked good. The tea will decline before you reach the bottom of the bag.
If you want a tea to age, buy white or dark tea. Yellow tea is not the category for it, and pretending otherwise costs real money given what it sells for.
Write the purchase date on the tin, and if the seller knows it, the harvest year too. With a tea this delicate and this short-lived, a date is the whole system.
The short version of this whole page: yellow tea is a buy-it-and-drink-it tea. Everything you do to store it should be aimed at the next six months, not the next six years.