What is barley coffee (orzo)? Italy's caffeine-free cup, and the one catch worth knowing
Barley coffee — caffè d'orzo in Italy — is a caffeine-free roasted-grain drink that brews dark and malty enough to pass for coffee. It's a centuries-tested tradition with a genuine claim on the 'tastes like coffee' slot. The one catch: barley is a gluten grain, which changes who it's for. Here's the honest version of what orzo is, where it came from, what it tastes like, and where it fits among coffee alternatives.
Most of the caffeine-free drinks I write about are New World plants or wellness-aisle newcomers — chicory, rooibos, the mushroom blends. Barley coffee is neither. It’s an old European kitchen staple that predates the wellness industry by generations, and in much of Italy it isn’t framed as a “coffee alternative” at all. It’s just orzo — what you order when you don’t want the caffeine, what your grandmother drank, what they hand the kids.
That ordinariness is exactly why it deserves a proper look. Barley coffee has done the thing most coffee alternatives are still trying to do — earn a permanent, unremarkable place in daily life — and it did it without a marketing budget. It also comes with one genuine catch that the cheerful “ancient grain” framing tends to skate past. Here’s the honest version: what barley coffee is, where it came from, what it tastes like, who it’s for, and the one group who should leave it on the shelf.
What barley coffee actually is
Barley coffee is a brewed drink made from roasted, ground barley grain — no coffee, no caffeine, just the grain. In Italy, where it’s most established, it’s called caffè d’orzo (literally “barley coffee”), and it’s poured everywhere from home moka pots to the espresso machines of ordinary cafés, where you can order an orzo the same way you’d order a decaf.
One quick disambiguation, because it trips people up: orzo is also the name of the small rice-shaped pasta. They’re related only by the word — orzo is simply the Italian for “barley,” and the pasta is named for its barley-grain shape. The drink is made from actual roasted barley grain, not from pasta. When an Italian menu lists orzo among the hot drinks, it means the barley coffee.
The drink belongs to the broader family of roasted-grain and roasted-root coffee substitutes — the same category as chicory, roasted dandelion root, and carob. What unites them is the method: take something starchy or fibrous, roast it dark, grind it, and brew it so the roast notes stand in for coffee’s. Barley is the grain member of that family, and arguably the most coffee-convincing of the grains because of how much sweetness and body the roasting develops.
Where it came from
Roasted-grain drinks are old — people have been roasting barley and other grains into hot beverages for centuries, across Europe and East Asia. But barley coffee’s modern Italian identity has a sharper, more recent origin: scarcity.
The story most often told is that caffè d’orzo took hold during the rationing years of the 1930s and 40s. After Italy’s 1935 invasion of Ethiopia, League of Nations sanctions and wartime shortages made real coffee expensive and hard to get, and households roasted barley as a stand-in. What started as a substitute outlived the scarcity that created it. More than 70 years on, caffè d’orzo never disappeared — and in a turn that should sound familiar to anyone watching the current coffee-alternative boom, it’s been picked up by health-conscious younger Italians who are wary of caffeine and happy to find that the wary option was sitting in the cupboard the whole time. Saveur documented this revival nicely in its piece on Italy’s caffeine-free coffee: dozens of roasters now make it, and it’s a genuinely popular order, not a museum piece.
There’s a parallel tradition worth knowing in East Asia. In Japan and Korea, roasted barley is steeped like tea rather than brewed like coffee — mugicha in Japan, boricha in Korea — and served chilled in summer as an everyday caffeine-free thirst-quencher. Same grain, same roast, different cup. It’s a useful reminder that “barley drink” spans a spectrum from a light steeped tea to a dark espresso-style brew, depending on roast and method.
How it’s made, and how to brew it
The production is simple and the same in spirit as roasting coffee: clean barley grain is roasted until dark, then ground. The roasting is the whole game — it caramelizes the barley’s natural sugars (a Maillard-and-caramelization process, the same chemistry that browns toast and coffee), which is what produces the nutty sweetness and the dark color. A lighter roast tastes toasty and grain-forward; a darker roast tastes more bitter and more coffee-like.
You’ll find it in three forms:
- Ground roasted barley, brewed like coffee. This is the traditional form — you brew it in a moka pot, a French press, a drip machine, or even an espresso machine, the same way you’d brew ground coffee. The methods that work for brewing roasted chicory root work for barley too, since both are coarse roasted grinds rather than tea leaves.
- Instant (soluble) barley, which dissolves in hot water or milk. This is the convenient everyday form — the Italian brand Orzo Bimbo (“barley for kids”) is the famous example, and it’s a staple of the children’s-drink shelf.
- Barley in blends, where it’s combined with chicory, rye, or figs in the broad “grain coffee” category — the same family as the Pero, Cafix, and Postum products you’ll see on North American shelves.
A rough starting point for brewing the ground form: use it about as strong as you’d use coffee — a tablespoon or so per cup — and adjust to taste. Because it isn’t acidic and won’t turn harshly bitter the way over-extracted coffee can, it’s forgiving. It also makes a notably good cappuccino; the malty notes and steamed milk are a natural pairing.
Caffeine-free, but not gluten-free
Here’s the part to get exactly right, because the two facts pull in opposite directions and the marketing tends to shout the good one and whisper the catch.
The good fact: it’s genuinely caffeine-free. Barley is a grain; the barley plant doesn’t produce caffeine the way the coffee bean and the tea leaf do. So barley coffee isn’t “decaffeinated” — there’s no caffeine in it to remove. Any brand, any roast, any brewing method: zero caffeine. That’s the clean part, and it’s why barley coffee has been a children’s drink and a pregnancy stand-in in Italy for generations.
The catch: barley is a gluten grain. Barley is one of the three gluten-containing grains, alongside wheat and rye — the Celiac Disease Foundation lists it plainly among the sources of gluten. That makes barley coffee unsuitable for anyone with celiac disease or a diagnosed gluten sensitivity.
You will run into a more optimistic version of this online — the claim that roasting destroys most of the gluten and that very little of it actually transfers into the brewed liquid, sometimes citing laboratory testing. There’s some real measurement behind that argument, and it may explain why some gluten-sensitive people report tolerating a cup. But it is not a green light: celiac organizations do not classify barley or barley-based beverages as gluten-free, the testing is not the same as a clinical safety guarantee, and the consequences of being wrong if you have celiac disease are not worth the gamble over a beverage. The responsible reading is the conservative one — if you have celiac disease, barley coffee is off the menu, roasting argument notwithstanding.
This is also the cleanest dividing line within the caffeine-free-coffee category. The roasted-root drinks — chicory, roasted dandelion, carob — are naturally gluten-free. The roasted-grain drinks — barley, rye, and many “grain coffee” blends — are not. If gluten matters to you, that root-versus-grain split is the thing to read off the label.
Who should be cautious
Beyond the celiac line, a few smaller notes:
- People with non-celiac gluten sensitivity. Same logic, lower stakes — if gluten reliably bothers you, barley coffee will likely be on the no list. Choose a chicory or carob roast instead.
- People managing IBS or following a low-FODMAP diet. Barley contains fructans, the same FODMAP group that makes chicory’s inulin a problem for sensitive guts. Monash University, which built the low-FODMAP diet, classifies barley as a higher-FODMAP grain. The brewed liquid carries less than the whole grain, and tolerance is individual, but if you’ve found that chicory coffee and your IBS don’t get along, barley is worth approaching the same cautious way — small serving first.
- Everyone else: there’s no special concern. Barley coffee is a roasted grain in hot water. It’s not a stimulant, it’s not acidic, and it doesn’t carry the caveats that come with the more bioactive herbal options.
What it actually tastes like
Of the caffeine-free options I keep in rotation, barley coffee is one of the most convincingly coffee-shaped — more so than rooibos or honeybush, which are soft, sweet, tea-like cups, and roughly in the same league as a good chicory roast.
The flavor is nutty and malty with a real roasted depth, and a natural sweetness from the caramelized grain sugars that means a lot of people drink it without adding anything. A dark roast leans bitter and coffee-like; a lighter roast tastes more like toasted grain or a malt drink. What it lacks is coffee’s acidity and sharp bitterness — barley is rounder and softer, which is either the appeal or the disappointment depending on what you’re after. Made into a cappuccino or a latte, it’s genuinely good; the malt and the milk are a natural match, and it’s one of the few alternatives where the milk version arguably beats the black.
Where to find it
Barley coffee is everywhere in Italy and increasingly findable elsewhere:
- Italian and European grocers and the international aisle. This is the cheapest, most authentic route. Italian brands like Crastan, Nestlé’s Orzoro, and the instant Orzo Bimbo show up at Italian delis, import shops, and online. A bag of instant orzo is inexpensive and lasts a long time.
- North American grain-coffee blends. The familiar supermarket caffeine-free options — Pero, Cafix, and similar — are grain-and-chicory blends that typically include barley. They’re easy to find in the coffee or natural-foods aisle, and they brew or dissolve quickly. (Because they contain barley, they’re not gluten-free either — same caveat.)
- Asian groceries, for roasted-barley tea (mugicha/boricha) in tea bags, if the chilled, tea-style version appeals more than the coffee-style brew.
- Herbal-coffee brands that use barley as a base. Several roasted-herbal-coffee makers — Teeccino among them — build some of their blends on a barley base alongside chicory, carob, and other roasted botanicals. Worth flagging honestly: it’s precisely the barley-based blends that are not gluten-free, so if you’re avoiding gluten, look specifically for a brand’s chicory-based, barley-free line and confirm it on the label rather than assuming “herbal coffee” means gluten-free. That root-versus-grain rule does a lot of work here.
Whatever the source, the price is modest — barley is one of the cheapest things you can put in a mug, and the instant versions in particular cost a fraction of the wellness-aisle blends.
Does it work as a coffee alternative?
Better than most, with the one asterisk.
On flavor and ritual, barley coffee earns its place in the roasted, coffee-shaped tier of caffeine-free alternatives rather than the soft-herbal-cup tier. It brews like coffee, it can run through the same equipment, it makes a real cappuccino, and it has centuries of evidence that people will actually keep drinking it — which is more than can be said for a lot of newer entrants. For someone leaving caffeine who misses the cup more than the buzz, it’s one of the most natural swaps available.
The asterisk is gluten, and it’s not a small one for the people it affects. If you have celiac disease, this isn’t your alternative, and the chicory and carob roasts are the gluten-free way to get the same roasted-cup experience. For everyone else, barley coffee is a genuinely strong, genuinely inexpensive, genuinely time-tested option that tends to get overlooked precisely because it’s old news in the places that know it best.
The bottom line
Barley coffee — caffè d’orzo — is a caffeine-free roasted-grain drink that brews dark, tastes nutty and malty, and comes about as close to coffee as a caffeine-free cup gets. It carries an unusually deep track record: a real European daily-drink tradition, an East Asian iced-tea cousin in mugicha, and a children’s-drink role that tells you everything about how gentle it is. The single thing to get right is that barley is a gluten grain, which makes it unsuitable for people with celiac disease no matter how the roasting argument is framed — and which is the reason to learn the simple root-versus-grain rule for this whole category. If gluten isn’t a concern for you, barley coffee is one of the most satisfying and most affordable caffeine-free cups on the shelf, and one that’s been quietly proving the point for the better part of a century.
Sources & further reading
- Caffè d'orzo — Wikipedia
- Barley Coffee: It's Just as Good as it Sounds — Saveur
- Sources of Gluten — Celiac Disease Foundation
- Barley and the low FODMAP diet — Monash University FODMAP
Reader conversation (5)
We read every response. Selected reader notes below.
Finally someone explains that orzo is not the pasta! My American friends are always so confused when I order it at the bar. For us it’s completely normal — my nonna drank it, my kids drink it, you can get it at any café next to the espresso machine. It’s not a “wellness” thing here, it’s just what you have when you don’t want the caffeine. Nice to see it written about properly instead of as some exotic discovery.
The gluten section is the responsible version of this I’ve been looking for. So many “barley coffee is a superfood” posts bury the fact that it’s literally barley. I have celiac and I’ve seen the “the roasting destroys the gluten” line used to wave people onto it — glad you didn’t. Switched to a chicory roast a while back and that’s the lane for us.
Appreciate that, Brett. That roasting-destroys-the-gluten argument has just enough lab behind it to sound authoritative, which is exactly what makes it risky to repeat without the caveat. For celiac readers the root-based roasts — chicory, dandelion, carob — are the safe category, and I’d rather say so plainly than split hairs over a beverage.
Tried instant Orzo Bimbo on a whim after a trip to Italy and I’m genuinely surprised how much I like it in milk. It really does make a decent “latte” without the afternoon crash. For anyone curious it’s cheap and lasts forever, so low risk to try.
Interesting to see the mugicha connection called out — grew up drinking cold roasted barley tea every summer and never thought of it as the same thing as “barley coffee.” Same grain, totally different cup like you said. The iced version is so refreshing and there’s zero caffeine so the kids drink jugs of it.
Quick question — I’ve got IBS and chicory coffee is hit or miss for me. You mention barley has FODMAPs too. Is the brewed cup actually a problem or is it mostly in the whole grain?
Honest answer: it’s individual. The fructans that make barley higher-FODMAP are more concentrated in the whole grain than in the brewed liquid, so a cup carries less than, say, a bowl of barley — but “less” isn’t “none,” and if chicory is already hit or miss for you, barley is worth treating the same cautious way. Try a small serving on a calm gut day and see. If both the root and the grain give you trouble, rooibos or honeybush are the gentle, FODMAP-friendly fallback.
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