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Green tea is becoming more and more popular, especially among health conscious people in Western countries. I am one of those who started drinking green tea as a result of wanting to have a healthier lifestyle. Many books and magazines speak warmly of the antioxidant properties of green tea, and I thought I would try.

I did not meet with instant success. The health benefits notwithstanding, I had some trouble with the taste. People often describe the flavor of green tea as “grassy” and “vegetal”, but to me is was like drinking a cup of liquid spinach, never one of my favorite vegetables.

The health benefits kept me going, though, and I soon learned to tolerate the taste. Barely. A few months later, I discovered white tea, which has three times the antioxidants, but does without the soaked spinach taste. In fact, the flavor of white tea was so weak, I went back to green tea soon after.

That was until I learned about yellow tea, which is a lot like green tea, but is manufactured specifically to get rid of the grassy taste. Yellow tea starts out as leaves from the same plant that green tea is made from, but the leaves are harvested earlier in the spring, and they are not cut or ground.

While green tea is very lightly fermented (or more correctly, oxidized), yellow tea is oxidized for slightly longer, and in several steps. It is dried sequentially, often between sheets of a special paper.

The process is more time intensive and painstaking than making green tea, but the result is a delicate, yellow tea leaf. And even better – the tea brewed on the leaves of yellow tea has no grassy taste. I would describe the flavor as flowery and fresh, but stronger and less subtle than white tea. Also, it seems yellow tea can take more steepings than green tea before the taste gets too weak.

Green tea is healthy because of the antioxidants, and yellow tea appears to retain the same health benefits. Or possibly even better ones: Yellow tea leaves are picked early in the spring, while they are still buds. This means that they are chock full of antioxidants, just like white tea, which is harvested at about the same time.

Yellow tea is still not widely available, since most tea farmers in China will manufacture more cost-effective green tea instead of yellow tea. But the supply is steadily increasing to fill the rising demand, and many internet vendors carry yellow tea in several varieties.

There is much to like about yellow tea, as far as I’m concerned. It looks great, smells good, has at least as good health benefits as green tea, and it tastes much better, at least to my palate. Yellow tea is well set to become the next great success story in the world of tea.

Joshua Montello is a journalist, a longtime tea connoisseur, and the webmaster of Yellow Tea Guide, the first ever website dedicated to the emerging success of yellow tea. Just by browsing the site, you will be a leading expert on yellow tea. Beat the rush, and learn all there is to know about yellow tea now, before it takes off for real!

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