Although good weather is long gone (unless you live in the Southern Hemisphere!) there is one drink my wife and I frequently enjoy: mugicha (麦茶), or roasted barely tea. As the name implies, this has nothing to do with tea leaves and is instead made with roasted barley. The taste is very earthy, roasted and best of all has no caffeine. Mugicha tastes really good chilled, so it’s a popular summer drink in Japan and similarly in Korean. Our little family drinks it all year though.
Despite the unusual style it’s thankfully easy to get in Seattle, and back in Ireland at Asian food stores.1 2 I can’t say I have a recommended brand myself (others are welcome to add opinions). I just usually picked something that looked good and authentically Japanese. Usually they come in large boxes that contain many “bags”. These are not small tea bags, but much larger. To use them, put one bag into a pitcher of water, and leave it in the refrigerator overnight. By morning, you have a nice, concentrated pitcher of mugicha. It’s probably too strong to drink straight (unless you’re my wife!) so pour some into a glass of water and enjoy.
I found it useful to also take the concentrated mugicha and pour it into a smaller water bottle I can take to work. When mixed with “water cooler” water, it makes plenty for you to drink all day. 
One word of warning: mugicha can go rancid, so if you buy it, make sure to use it up fairly quickly or else. I didn’t know that, and while living in Ireland with my wife in Japan, I had a bunch of mugicha I didn’t finish. I drank some (possibly rancid) mugicha and it didn’t taste very good. I didn’t get sick thankfully, but it’s a good idea to listen to food warnings more carefully. :-p
I wanted to talk about mugicha for quite a while but didn’t find the time to write the post until recently. Summer’s long over, but ask any Japanese person and they’ll tell you that mugicha inspires lots of memories of summer. The supposed health benefits of decreased stress are a nice bonus if true. Frankly since I started mugicha to work a few weeks ago, I lost the urge to drink soft drinks from the vending machine at work. No joke. I had a hard time beating that habit for years, sometimes I succeeded, sometimes I lost the willpower. But lately, I never miss it. Mugicha is that good in my opinion.
P.S. As linked above, this blog is an excellent overview of food and Japanese culture.
P.P.S. By the title, you probably thought I would talk about drinking places like izakaya (居酒屋) or preferred beverages found therein. Let’s just say that I prefer not to drink.
1 Compared to Seattle, Dublin was a much more tea-drinking society (probably owing to British influence) than coffee. This made very useful omiyage gifts for my wife’s family and friends when we visited Japan that year. My wife still misses the good tea and such.
2 By the way, if you’re looking for a good Asian food store in Dublin, I highly recommend the old Asian Market on Drury St. Their selection varies a lot depending on what gets imported at the time but their variety is good and prices reasonable.
This blog is the reflection of my efforts to explore fatherhood, Buddhism and my love of Japanese culture. Anything useful I can pass along makes the Internet hopefully a better place.
Dear fellow Buddhists, I have created a website to promote the Cundi Mantra and would like to share it with you. The address:
http://cundimantra.weebly.com/
With Metta, Yueheng