Sam Park's wife, Min-jung, came home from her mother's place in Daejeon in the summer of 2019 with a paper bag of roasted barley and a sentence: this is what you drink in summer.
He had grown up in a household that drank water at meals, with the occasional bottle of beer for his father, and he had never tasted barley tea. Min-jung's family had drunk it for three generations, brewed in a heavy kettle on the stove and refrigerated by the gallon.
Seven summers later, the Park kitchen runs on mugicha from late May through early October. The pitcher is a two-litre glass jug from a Korean homeware brand, with a silicone stopper that does not leak, and it lives on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator beside whatever fruit is in season.
The brewing is ridiculous in its simplicity. Sam fills a saucepan with about two and a half litres of filtered water, adds a quarter-cup of roasted barley, and brings it to a simmer. He turns the heat off, covers the pan, and lets it steep for about twenty minutes.
The barley is the only variable that matters. He has used Korean-roasted barley from a shop in Itaewon, Japanese-style mugicha barley sold by a small importer in Mapo, and a darker Chinese barley that turns the water almost mahogany. The Korean one is what they buy most often. The Japanese is slightly milder and what they serve to guests.
After steeping he strains the tea through a fine-mesh sieve into the pitcher and lets it cool on the counter for about an hour. Then it goes into the refrigerator, where it lives until they finish it, usually within three days.
The colour is somewhere between weak black tea and good chicken stock. The taste is nutty, slightly sweet, with a faint roasted bitterness at the back of the throat. There is no caffeine. There is no acid. It is one of the most refreshing things he has ever drunk, and he says this as a person who spent five years buying iced coffees on hot afternoons.
The household uses about two litres a day in July and August. Min-jung pours a glass when she comes in from the heat. Sam drinks it with lunch. They serve it to dinner guests in small pottery cups that they bought in Icheon at a ceramics festival in 2022.
It pairs particularly well with anything spicy, which is most of what they cook in summer. Cold buckwheat noodles with kimchi, a soft tofu stew with chili oil, the late-summer corn that Min-jung's mother sends down boiled and salted in a jar. The mugicha clears the palate without competing.
It also makes a useful kitchen liquid. Sam has cooked rice with it (good, faintly nutty), used it to thin a sesame-noodle sauce (very good), and made an iced version with a splash of soy milk and a drop of honey (interesting, not a recipe he repeats).
He has tried hot mugicha in winter and found it good, but not as good as a green or black tea in the same role. The barley tea wants ice. It is at its best at refrigerator temperature, in a glass with no garnish.
Children drink it. This was, for a long time, his evidence that the drink was simple and good. Friends with small children would come over in summer and the children would drink three glasses each, and the adults would drink the same, and the pitcher would be empty by sundown.
The cost is negligible. A 500-gram bag of roasted barley costs about 6,000 won and makes roughly twenty litres of finished tea. The economics make it absurd not to keep a pitcher in the refrigerator if you live in a place with hot summers.
He understands that mugicha is not new. It has been a Korean and Japanese household staple for centuries; he is not introducing it to anyone who already knows it. He is writing about it for the readers who, like himself in 2019, have never tried it.
If you live somewhere where Asian groceries are within reach, the barley is easy to find. If you do not, mail-order is reliable. The shelf life of the dry barley is years; the brewed tea, refrigerated, holds for about four days before it begins to flatten.
Min-jung's mother makes hers slightly differently. She toasts the barley a second time in a dry pan before brewing, for about three minutes, which deepens the flavour. Sam has tried this and finds it marginally better; the extra step is the kind he does on Sundays and not on Tuesdays.
There is a version of this piece that pretends mugicha is a discovery and a version that pretends it is exotic, and neither of those would be honest. It is what the Park household drinks in summer because his wife's family taught him to, and because once you have lived with it, the alternative feels thin.
The pitcher is on the bottom shelf right now. He poured a glass an hour ago, while he was writing this. The ice was from the freezer drawer, the glass was the same Duralex he uses for everything else, and the only thing he added to it was a small slice of lemon, which his mother-in-law would consider unnecessary.
She would be right. The mugicha does not need it. He likes the lemon anyway, on a Wednesday, when the afternoon is long and the apartment is warm and the next thing he has to do is not for another hour.
Tomorrow he will brew another pitcher. The barley bag in the cupboard is half-full. The summer is just getting started.
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