Mugicha: The Barley Tea Japan Actually Drinks All Summer

Open the fridge of a Japanese house in August and there is a good chance you will find a two-litre jug of something brown and cold. It is not green tea. It is not iced black tea. It contains no tea leaves whatsoever.

It is mugicha — roasted barley tea — and it is close to invisible in English-language writing about Japanese drinks, despite being what an enormous number of Japanese households actually drink through the summer.

Here is the detail that says the most about its place in Japanese life: when someone in a Japanese home says they are going to make some tea for the fridge, mugicha is very often what they mean. Green tea is bought. Barley tea is made.

What it actually is

Barley grains, roasted until dark, then steeped in water. That is the entire ingredient list.

This matters more than it sounds, because it means mugicha is not made from Camellia sinensis — the plant that every real tea comes from. Sencha, gyokuro, matcha, hojicha, oolong and black tea are all the same species processed differently. Mugicha is not on that family tree at all.

The consequence is the thing that makes it a household fixture: no tea plant means no caffeine. Not "low caffeine" — none, because there is no source for it in the ingredients. This is why it gets served to small children, drunk late at night, and poured for everyone at the table without anyone having to think about it.

	Mugicha	Green tea
Made from	Roasted barley	Camellia sinensis leaves
Caffeine	None	Moderate to high
Tannins / astringency	None	Present
Taste	Toasty, nutty, faintly sweet	Grassy, savoury, astringent
Served	Cold, in volume	Hot or cold, by the cup
Cost	Very low	Low to very high
Brewed with	Cold water, hours	Hot water, seconds to minutes

That last row is the practical difference. Green tea is brewed by the cup and drunk fairly soon after. Mugicha is made by the jug in the morning and drunk all day.

Why it owns the summer

Japanese summers are hot in a way that is difficult to convey — high thirties with humidity that makes the air feel like a wet towel. You do not sip in that weather. You drink in volume, repeatedly, for weeks.

That requirement rules out most of the alternatives. Green tea has caffeine and costs more. Soft drinks have sugar. Water is water. Mugicha is cheap enough to make by the jug, has nothing in it that you would want to limit, and tastes like something rather than nothing.

It also happens to be doing well in bottled form. In the Ministry of Agriculture's tracking of soft drink consumption, bottled barley tea has climbed steadily over the past fifteen years and now sits above both bottled black tea and bottled oolong — a quiet reordering that has gone almost entirely unremarked outside Japan.

Consumption trends from the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, "Current State and Issues of the Tea Industry and Tea Culture" (November 2024), citing the Japan Soft Drink Association.

It was a street drink before it was a household one

Barley tea is old, and for most of its history it was not a domestic drink at all.

Under the name mugiyu — literally "barley hot water" — it was what ordinary people in Edo-period Japan drank, for the straightforward reason that green tea was expensive and barley was not. By the Bunka–Bunsei era (1804–1830), night stalls selling it had appeared in Edo, marked with paper lanterns reading mugiyu. By the end of the period there were mugiyu shops functioning as something close to the modern café: cheap, sociable, open in the evening.

There is a pleasing symmetry in this. The drink now associated with children and family fridges spent the nineteenth century as an evening drink you went out for.

The switch from hot to cold came much later, with refrigeration — which is why every historical reference calls it "barley hot water" and every modern Japanese fridge holds it cold.

How to make it

Two methods, and Japanese households use both.

Cold brew (the default). Drop one barley teabag into a 1–2 litre jug of cold water, put it in the fridge, and leave it for two to four hours — or overnight. Remove the bag once it is done; leaving it in indefinitely does not improve anything and shortens how long the jug keeps.

Boiled (stronger, more aromatic). Bring water to the boil, add the bag, simmer for three to five minutes, then cool. This pulls out considerably more of the roasted aroma and produces a darker, rounder drink. It is what you do when you want the barley to taste like something you notice.

	Cold brew	Boiled
Time	2–4 hours, unattended	5 minutes, plus cooling
Flavour	Lighter, cleaner	Deeper, more roasted
Effort	None	Some
Best for	Everyday jug	When you actually want to taste it

Either way, drink it within two to three days. It has no tannins or acidity to protect it, so it goes off faster than you would expect from something that seems this simple. Keep it refrigerated the whole time.

What it tastes like

Toasted grain. The nearest reference point for most people is the smell of roasting coffee, minus the bitterness and most of the intensity — or a very light, unsweetened barley malt.

What it does not have is as important as what it does. No astringency, no bitterness, no drying sensation on the tongue. Nothing to balance or brew around. This is why it works in volume: there is no compound in it that becomes unpleasant on the fifth glass.

If you have had Korean boricha, you have essentially had this — the two are close relatives, with Korean versions sometimes blending in roasted corn.

Who it is for

• Anyone avoiding caffeine. This is the honest answer to "what should I drink in the evening" — better than hojicha, which is low in caffeine but not free of it
• Children. It is a standard children's drink in Japan, which tells you most of what you need to know about how gentle it is
• Hot weather, in quantity. The use case it was built for
• People who find green tea too astringent. There is nothing here to dislike

On pregnancy: mugicha is frequently chosen in Japan precisely because it has no caffeine. That said, this article is not medical advice — if you are pregnant or nursing, take dietary questions to your doctor or midwife rather than a tea site.

Buying it

Look for barley teabags sold for jug-brewing — typically packs of 20 to 50, each bag intended for one to two litres. Japanese supermarkets sell them by the shelf-metre from May onwards.

Two things worth checking:

• Roast level. Darker roasts give more aroma and a rounder flavour. This is the main quality variable, and it is rarely stated on the label in any useful way
• Whether it is pure barley. Some blends add roasted corn or brown rice. Nothing wrong with them, but they taste different

The good news is that this is one Japanese drink where you do not need to spend much. Unlike matcha or gyokuro, the gap between cheap barley tea and expensive barley tea is small.

The short version

• Mugicha is roasted barley, not tea — no Camellia sinensis, therefore no caffeine at all
• It is what Japanese households make by the jug through the summer; green tea gets bought, barley tea gets made
• Cold brew 2–4 hours in the fridge, or boil 3–5 minutes for a deeper roast
• Drink it within 2–3 days — nothing in it protects it from going off
• It was a night-stall drink in Edo-period Japan before refrigeration made it a household one
• It is cheap, and paying more does not get you much

---

If you are working out which teas to drink when, our caffeine guide covers where each Japanese tea sits, and what Japanese people actually drink every day puts the barley jug in context. New to the leaf teas? Start with the guide to the types.