As we move through the calendar year, we each have those special things that evoke the season. In the summer, it may be the taste of barbecue or fresh berries, the sound of splashing water, or the scent of citronella candles. My cup of tea is, well, a particular cup of tea, and the reason for it goes back a number of decades.
When I went away to college at 17, I chose to live in the same dorm as my cousin who was a year ahead of me. Just before I got to college, I had spent the summer on an Israeli kibbutz, hanging out quite a bit with the Japanese volunteers (and developing a crush on one of them.) This, by the way, was the first step of eventually switching my major from Everything About China to Everything About Japan. College was the perfect place to be learning about intercultural experiences and meeting friends from other countries.
For the first semester of my freshman year I had a dorm roommate who, while friendly and pleasant enough, led a social life that was very different from anything I was interested in—one that focused mainly on going out for Harvey Wallbangers and crawling back in the middle of night...in other words, entirely normal for college. (My own pub-crawling years were yet to come, however, and would usually include singing Japanese drinking songs. A story for another time, perhaps.) As we neared the end of the semester, Roommate informed me she was moving on to live with a friend, it's been great, hope to see you around campus, etc.
I needed a new roommate stat. And yes, I'm getting to tea.
It just happened that my new friend Yoko also lost her roommate and so she soon moved in. Yoko's dad's company (the infamous Marubeni which was involved in several scandals) had brought the family to live the US for a while a few years earlier. It was great fun living with Yoko, and on a few momentous occasions after drinking a beer or two, Yoko would gleefully perform a parody of a Japanese eel dance, a dance which is funny enough to begin with even without beer.
Came the summer, and we went to our respective homes. One particularly humid summer day I took my mom's car and went to visit Yoko at her home in Forest Hills. Her poor mom! ran back and forth with sushi, which I was not then yet able to appreciate, perhaps making me a less than perfect guest (don't judge--sushi was not yet a thing in America. I eventually got with the program.)
But then she brought something else.
In 1973 many middle class homes did not have air conditioning. We lived with the heat and the mugginess. We'd step out of the shower and never completely dry off. And that day was exceptionally hot and muggy.
Mrs. Aoyagi came in bearing clear glass coffee cups with what looked like iced coffee, a bit lighter perhaps. (And clear glass coffee cups? What cool home goods design magic was this?) My first sip confused me. It was roasty like coffee, but it wasn't coffee. A few more sips and I was hooked on mugi-cha, or roasted barley tea also known as "bori-cha" in Korea.
Mugi-cha is a summer staple in Japan. It is not the same as genmai cha, which you may have had at Japanese restaurants, and which is green tea with roasted rice puffs. Mugi-cha is nothing but roasted barley.
How to make it? Well, I'm sure there a myriad recipes all over the web, but all I do is plunk a giant tea bag into a liter of water and refrigerate. When I moved to Israel at a time when there was little-to-no access to imported Japanese groceries, I bought barley at a health food store, roasted it in a toaster oven, brewed it and chilled it. A lot of work that got old fast, but that's how much I craved it. After all, Tel-Aviv summers are pretty humid too.
What else? Well, mugi-cha is caffeine-free and its proponents claim it has all sorts of health benefits. For me its a summer staple as very little refreshes like cold mugi-cha, crisply topaz-hued and always in glass.
