Ask most tea drinkers to name the kinds of tea, and they'll reach green, black, oolong, perhaps white and pu-erh. Yellow tea — huangcha — almost never makes the list. It is the rarest of the six classes, made in small quantities by a handful of producers, and for a long stretch of the twentieth century it nearly disappeared altogether.
What sets it apart is a single, patient step. After the leaves are picked and lightly fired, they are wrapped — in cloth, in paper, sometimes in their own warmth — and left to rest. This is men huang, 'sealing yellow': a slow, gentle yellowing that can take hours or days. The leaves are not heavily oxidized like a black tea; they are simply given time. Heat and moisture, held close, round off the brisk grassiness of a green tea and coax out something mellower — a soft, sweet, almost custard-like depth.
Jun Shan Yin Zhen
The most storied yellow tea comes from Junshan Island, a sliver of land in Dongting Lake in Hunan Province. Jun Shan Yin Zhen — 'Junshan Silver Needle' — is made only from young buds, each one plump and downy and upright. Brewed in a tall glass, the needles are said to rise and fall, standing on end before they settle, a small performance old accounts describe with obvious affection.
In the cup it is pale gold and quiet: a whisper of smoke, a silky body, a sweetness that arrives late and lingers. There is nothing loud about it. It does not demand attention so much as reward it.
A tea for the late hour
That is exactly why yellow tea belongs to the night. The rare leaves reward the same thing a good evening does — patience, attention, the willingness to slow down enough to notice. A cup of Jun Shan Yin Zhen is not something to drink quickly on the way to somewhere else. It asks you to sit, to let it cool a degree, to take the second steeping more seriously than the first.
At Moon & Steam, the rarest leaves are poured by the pot and meant to be lingered over — sipped slowly, spoken softly around. Yellow tea is a fitting place to begin: the tea the world almost forgot, made by doing less and waiting longer.
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