>>
>> Oh Danny, I am SO confused yet again, for this defines Pu'erh, or so I
>> thought.
>>>
> Haha! Exactly the same thought when I was typing that!
>
> There is however one major difference: water. Pu'er makers speed up the
> fermentation process by hydro-thermal fermentation, increasing the microbe
> activity on the tea,

Are we talking about the cheating "wet blanket" approach to Pu'erh here?

> Yellow tea makers do not use water. After the tea is
> pan-fried to about 40% dryness, it is roasted to about 70% dryness. While
> the tea is hot it is packed and stored up to 7 days to allow it to ferment.
> When the tea makers decide the tea is about done, it is returned to the
> roast and baked up to 95% dryness.

Don't we mean "oxidize" here, not "ferment"?
>
> What Jim had is probably the small or large leaf tea variety, not the bud
> tea. Mengding Huangya is a yellow tea with slightly different
> characteristic. Good & 'real' quality Mengding Huangya is truly difficult
> to obtain, and its price per ounce is worth almost as much as those
> prize-winning green teas. & I had only 3 small cups of it once...the others
> that I have tried since are nothing like that one time. What we usually have
> are teas of a lesser grade, and mostly in what I would term 'an awkard
> position' between a green and yellow tea. That said, the Mengding Huangya
> tastes more like green tea, with a 'brothy' texture. What I can describe in
> food term is that it is like a green tea broth with kombu, while most of the
> other yellow teas are more of a kombu broth with green tea...& I'm getting
> the itch for Japanese food now...haha!

Japanese food sounds like just the thing.

Michael