Yellow tea

Yellow tea (huang cha) is a Chinese tea from Camellia sinensis leaf processed almost like green tea, with one extra stage: the leaf is kept covered until it turns yellow. UKTIA calls it the rarest style, below 1 % of China's production.

The raw material is the same tea bush as for other types. UKTIA names Anhui and Hunan provinces as the main areas.

The order of work runs like this: fixing with heat, rolling, covered yellowing (men huang), drying. Yellowing slows oxidation and the leaf turns yellow; researchers link the colour to the flavonols kaempferol and quercetin. Traditional natural yellowing runs at 15–25 °C and 40–60 % humidity. For Huoshan Huang Ya, one paper describes a shift from 20 °C, 55 % and 48 hours to 34 °C, 67 % and 16 hours, though this comes from a secondary citation.

UKTIA reports that the method was lost for about a century and rediscovered in the 1970s; there is no independent confirmation. Huoshan Huang Ya from Anhui joined the EU's protected names on 1 March 2021 through the EU–China agreement.

Yellowing is what separates it from Green tea, which is rolled and dried straight after fixing. White tea is not heated at all, and Oolong tea is oxidised far more. The sources give no separate caffeine or brewing figures for yellow tea, so the general Types of tea page is your guide.

On the pack, look for Huoshan Huang Ya or Junshan Yinzhen; the first may carry a PGI symbol.

Why this matters to you: yellow tea is easy to mistake for green, and the place name on the label is the surest clue.