Huang Da Cha

I recommend using rather lower temperatures for the tea. It is quite bitter and abrasive at the 100 degrees mentioned on the website.

When dry, the leaves smell quite a bit like hojicha. There are notes of toasted bread, hay, salep drink and vanilla ice-cream. Once wet, the aroma reminds me more of yancha (Tie Luo Han in particular). Specific notes include toasted peanuts, cinnamon, popcorn, curry leaves, and roast beef.

The tea tastes very toasty, bitter and woody with a decent sweetness as well. Because of the somewhat overwhelming bitterness, I didn’t find many associations beyond coffee among the immediate flavours.

More complexity is noticeable in the protracted aftertaste, once some of the bitterness subsides. Dominant flavours there are nutty predominately, such as hazelnuts, nutmeg, and tree bark. Later on in the session, a distinctive tree sap sweetness appears too.

Geek Steep S1E10 – Squirrel Girl

Firstly, a shout out to my friend and coworker Red Phoenix for kindly gifting me this tea sample!! This was the tea I drank during recording for the episode – and I actually made a teapot of it and shared it with Marika, so this was the first episode where we drank the same tea while recording!

I don’t always love yellow tea, but in my humble opinion the best yellow teas are the ones with toasty peanut and hazelnut notes and when I opened the bag of this tea that’s exactly what it smelled like! Really cozy, roasty and perfect. Also perfectly themed for the Geek of the Week, Squirrel Girl! Both Marika and I went the obvious route with our “main pairings” by choosing super nutty tea blends, but this was sort of a less obvious way of approaching that nutty taste – and I loved that we got to share the pot and enjoy it together!

Also to give some insight of how far out in advance some of our podcast episodes were recorded…

We drank this during September, and the reason we ended up sharing a pot of tea while recording (aside from it just being a nice thing to do) was because the September Sipdown prompt for the day was to share a pot of tea with someone!

Our Website: https://www.geeksteep.com/
Our Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/geeksteep/

Listen to us on Buzzsprout:
https://www.buzzsprout.com/1286036/podcast/website

DB topic:
https://steepster.com/discuss/42133-geek-steep-a-new-tea-and-fandom-podcast

If you want to get caught up on the Geek of The Week for next Thursday, the spoiler for our explored fandom is at the bottom of our latest DB post!