What is mugicha (roasted barley tea)? The Japanese iced cup that isn't coffee at all
Mugicha — roasted barley tea, called boricha in Korea — is a caffeine-free summer staple across East Asia. It's the same grain as barley coffee, but a lighter roast, steeped instead of brewed strong, and served cold by the pitcher. Here's what mugicha actually is, where it came from, how to make it, and the one catch (gluten) it shares with barley coffee.
When I wrote about barley coffee — Italy’s caffè d’orzo — I mentioned in passing that the same grain shows up halfway around the world in a completely different cup: the roasted-barley iced tea that Japan calls mugicha and Korea calls boricha. Several readers wrote in asking about it, and they were right to. It deserves its own explainer, because it isn’t a footnote to barley coffee. It’s arguably the bigger tradition — a drink so ordinary in East Asian summers that calling it a “coffee alternative” would make people there laugh. It was never trying to be coffee in the first place.
That’s what makes it interesting for anyone leaving caffeine behind. Most of the alternatives I cover are reaching toward coffee — trying to match its bitterness, its body, its morning ritual. Mugicha isn’t reaching for anything. It’s just what you drink when it’s hot and you’re thirsty and you’d like it to taste like something. Here’s the honest version: what it is, how it differs from the barley coffee you may already know, where it came from, how to make it, and the one catch it carries.
What mugicha actually is
Mugicha is a tea made by steeping roasted barley grains in water. No coffee, no actual tea leaf, no caffeine — just barley that’s been roasted until it’s dark and toasty, then infused in hot or cold water and strained out. In Japan it’s mugicha (麦茶, literally “barley tea”); in Korea, boricha (보리차); in China, dàmàichá. The drink is close enough across all three that the recipes are essentially interchangeable.
The defining thing about mugicha is that it’s a summer drink, and specifically an iced one. While barley coffee in Italy is mostly a hot cup, mugicha’s natural habitat is a big glass pitcher in the refrigerator, poured cold over ice on a humid afternoon. Many Japanese and Korean households keep one going all summer as their default non-alcoholic drink — the thing kids grab after playing outside, the thing set out with meals instead of water.
Barley tea vs. barley coffee: same grain, different cup
If you’ve read the barley coffee piece, the obvious question is: how is this different? Same grain, so what changed?
Three things — roast, grind, and method:
- Roast level. Barley coffee is roasted dark, the way coffee beans are, to build bitterness and coffee-like depth. Mugicha’s barley is roasted more lightly, to a toasty golden-brown, which keeps the flavor nutty and gentle rather than bitter. The more you roast barley, the darker and more bitter it gets — barley coffee pushes that dial hard; barley tea stops earlier.
- Grind. Barley coffee is ground fine so it can be brewed strong, like coffee grounds. Mugicha keeps the grains whole (or packs them into a teabag), so it steeps like a tea rather than extracting like a coffee.
- Method and purpose. Barley coffee is brewed — concentrated, in a moka pot or espresso machine or drip — to stand in for a morning coffee. Mugicha is steeped or simmered lightly and served cold, to stand in for water on a hot day.
So they’re genuinely two different drinks made from one ingredient. Think of it like the difference between an espresso and a glass of iced tea: nobody confuses the two, even though the raw material overlaps. Barley coffee wants to be your morning cup; mugicha wants to be your all-day pitcher.
Where it came from
Barley is one of the oldest cultivated grains in East Asia, and roasted-barley drinks have a long history there — long enough that mugicha predates the arrival of green tea as an everyday drink in Japan. It shows up as a refined beverage in the Heian court, became a practical hydration drink for people working and traveling in hot weather, and by the Edo period (roughly the 1600s–1800s) it was sold at dedicated barley-tea stalls as a summer refreshment for ordinary people.
The modern form — the ice-cold pitcher — is a 20th-century development that tracks with home refrigeration. Once households had refrigerators, mugicha shifted from a hot drink to the quintessential cold summer staple it is today. In Japan there’s even a loose association between the early-summer barley harvest and the start of mugicha season, which is a nice reminder that this is a seasonal, agricultural drink at heart, not a manufactured “wellness beverage.” (The specific dates and dynastic details vary by source, so I’d take any single tidy origin story with a grain of salt — what’s clear is that the tradition is old and continuous.)
Korea’s boricha runs on a parallel track and is just as everyday there — in many Korean homes it’s the water that comes out of the tap’s memory, brewed by the potful and kept in the fridge as the house drink.
Why it’s caffeine-free
This is the simplest part, and it’s the same logic as barley coffee, chicory, carob, and every other grain- or root-based brew: the plant doesn’t make caffeine. Caffeine is produced by a specific set of plants — the coffee shrub, the tea plant, cacao, yerba mate, guarana, kola — as (among other things) a natural pesticide. Barley isn’t on that list. So mugicha isn’t decaffeinated barley tea; there was never any caffeine in it to remove.
That’s a meaningful distinction if you’re sensitive to even trace caffeine, because “caffeine-free by nature” and “decaffeinated” are not the same promise. Decaf coffee still contains a few milligrams per cup; so does decaf tea. Mugicha contains zero, the same way rooibos does — because in both cases the source plant simply never produced any.
You’ll occasionally see mugicha marketed with claims that it “contains melatonin” or otherwise aids sleep. I’d file those under interesting-but-unproven — the evidence for a meaningful functional sleep effect from a cup of barley tea is thin, and the honest reason mugicha won’t keep you up is just that it has no caffeine, not that it’s actively sedating. That’s already a good enough reason to drink it at night.
The one catch: it’s still barley
Here’s the part the cheerful “ancient grain, endless benefits” write-ups tend to skip, and it’s the same catch that applies to barley coffee: barley is a gluten grain. It contains hordein, a gluten protein in the same family as the gliadin in wheat, which means mugicha is not gluten-free and not safe for people with celiac disease.
You’ll find a specific counter-argument online — that roasting destroys most of the gluten and that independent lab testing (at the University of Nebraska) found gluten doesn’t extract from roasted barley into the brewed liquid. That testing is real. But celiac organizations still do not classify barley or barley-based drinks as gluten-free, some gluten-sensitive people report reacting anyway, and “probably fine” is not a standard I’d apply to a serious autoimmune condition. So the conservative read stands: if you have celiac disease or a diagnosed gluten sensitivity, treat mugicha as off-limits, full stop.
This is the durable rule for the whole roasted-brew category, and it’s worth memorizing: roots and seeds are gluten-free; grains are not. Chicory, dandelion, and carob come from roots and pods — gluten-free. Barley, rye, and most “grain coffee” blends are grains — not. If you need a caffeine-free iced cup and you need it gluten-free, cold-steeped rooibos, honeybush, or a chicory-based roast is the category to shop in.
How to make it
Mugicha is forgiving, which is part of its charm. You have three easy routes.
From teabags (easiest). Barley-tea bags are sold widely — Japanese and Korean brands, plus a few Western ones. Cold-brew style: drop one bag into a 1–2 liter pitcher of cold water, refrigerate a few hours or overnight, remove the bag. Hot style: steep a bag in hot water 3–5 minutes, then chill.
From roasted barley grains (best flavor). Use about 2 tablespoons of roasted barley per liter of water. To brew hot, bring the water to a boil, add the barley (loose or in a strainer), reduce the heat, and simmer around 5 minutes — longer and hotter for a stronger, darker cup; a cold water steep for a lighter one. Strain, cool, and refrigerate. It keeps in the fridge for up to about a week, and many people think the flavor deepens by day two.
Roasting your own (optional). If you have raw barley, toast it in a dry skillet over medium heat, stirring more or less constantly, for about 8–10 minutes until the grains are golden-brown and smell distinctly nutty. Don’t walk away — the line between toasty and scorched is short. Then brew as above.
A cold pitcher is the classic serve, plain over ice. Some people add a slice of lemon or a splash of it into other drinks, but honestly, straight and cold is the point.
What it tastes like
Toasty, nutty, faintly sweet, and light. Because the roast is gentler and it’s steeped rather than brewed strong, mugicha is far less intense than barley coffee — no real bitterness, no coffee-like heaviness, just a clean roasted-grain flavor a little like the smell of toast or the crust of good bread. Iced, it reads as genuinely refreshing rather than rich; it quenches thirst the way water does but with something to taste, which is exactly the job it’s meant to do.
If you’re coming to it expecting a coffee substitute, recalibrate: this is not that, and it’s happier not being that. It’s closer in spirit to an unsweetened iced tea than to a cup of coffee — which, on a 90-degree afternoon, is often what you actually wanted anyway. For the mornings when you do want the coffee-shaped cup, that’s what barley coffee and the wider caffeine-free roundup are for.
Where it fits among coffee alternatives
Mugicha isn’t going to replace your morning coffee, and it isn’t trying to. Where it earns its place is the slot most coffee-alternative conversations forget: the hot afternoon, the dinner table, the all-day pitcher, the caffeine-free drink you can hand a kid. It’s the summer counterpart to a mug of something roasted and warm.
If you’re building a caffeine-free life rather than just a caffeine-free morning, that afternoon-and-evening slot matters more than people expect — it’s often the second and third cups, not the first, that quietly wreck sleep. Mugicha fills it cheaply, cleanly, and with real cultural pedigree. Pair it with other iced caffeine-free options for variety, keep it gluten in mind if that’s a concern for your household, and enjoy the fact that for once you’re drinking something that was never pretending to be coffee.
The bottom line
Mugicha is roasted barley tea: caffeine-free by nature, light and toasty in flavor, served cold by the pitcher across Japan and Korea all summer long. It’s the same grain as barley coffee but a milder roast, steeped rather than brewed strong, and built to quench thirst rather than to mimic espresso. The one real caveat is gluten — barley is a gluten grain, so mugicha is off-limits for anyone with celiac disease, and root- or leaf-based caffeine-free drinks are the safer pick there. For everyone else, it’s one of the easiest, most pleasant, and most quietly time-tested caffeine-free drinks you can make — and a good reminder that not every cup has to be trying to be coffee.
Sources & further reading
- Mugicha Explained: Japan's Nutty and Refreshing Roasted Barley Tea — Bokksu
- Korean Barley Tea (Boricha) — My Korean Kitchen
- Barley Tea: Nutrition, Benefits, and Side Effects — Healthline
- Sources of Gluten — Celiac Disease Foundation
Reader conversation (5)
We read every response. Selected reader notes below.
This is the first Western write-up I’ve seen that gets it right — mugicha is not a coffee thing, it’s the summer thing. Growing up there was always a giant pitcher in the fridge and you drank it instead of water. Nobody thought about caffeine because it was just what was there. Nice to see it treated as its own drink and not “here’s another coffee substitute.”
Thank you — that was exactly the correction I wanted to make. It kept getting name-checked as a barley-coffee cousin, and framing it that way sells it short. It was never trying to be coffee, and that’s the whole appeal.
Korean here, we call it boricha and it genuinely is the “water” in a lot of homes — my mom brews a huge pot and it lives in the fridge year round, not just summer. We gave diluted boricha to both my kids as babies (with our pediatrician’s okay). Glad you flagged the “ask your doctor” part because I’ve seen people online treat infant feeding advice way too casually.
Appreciate the gluten section not pulling punches. I have celiac and I got burned once by a “barley tea is fine, the gluten doesn’t extract” thread. It did not go well for me. The roots-and-seeds-are-safe-grains-are-not rule is the cleanest way I’ve ever heard it put — saving that.
I’m sorry you learned it the hard way — and thank you for saying so here, because that “the lab says it’s fine” argument circulates a lot and it’s exactly the kind of thing that shouldn’t be tested on an autoimmune condition. For a cold caffeine-free cup, rooibos and chicory are the safe lane.
Small tip from years of making this: don’t sleep on the cold-brew method with a teabag overnight. Way less bitter than boiling, and you wake up to a full pitcher. I do one bag in about 1.5 liters and pull it in the morning. Boiling is better if you want it darker and more toasty though.
Found this because I’ve been trying to get off my third-and-fourth iced coffees in the summer heat and everything “coffee-flavored” just made me want the real thing. Mugicha is the first one that scratched a totally different itch — cold, toasty, not sweet, actually refreshing. Made a pitcher yesterday and it’s already gone.
Have something to add? Email us and we may include it in a future update.