Growing up, one of my favorite beverages was iced barley tea. It would be lightly sweetened, and it was a very refreshing beverage, especially during the winter. I happened to purchase a large amount of mugicha(barley tea) bags from my local Japanese grocery store a while ago, and while I love having mugicha around to sip on, I also love not having bags of it clutter up my pantry. So I figured, why not use some of these to make a nice, refreshing summer beverage? I wanted to keep this recipe simple, since drink recipes should be simple, so I kept it under 5 ingredients! We need mugicha bags, palm sugar, water, and kecap manis, which is a sweet Indonesian soy sauce. It sounds weird to add kecap manis to this, but for context, this is soy sauce that has been essentially boiled down with sugar into a molasses-like syrup. It adds seasoning as well as a rich sweetness that plays off of the palm sugar beautifully. Palm sugar itself has an earthiness and a caramelized flavor that adds complexity to both sweet and savory dishes! Which is why we are melting those two together with water to form a syrup and using that syrup to sweeten the mugicha! On its own, mugicha is nutty, and if served warm, very comforting, and if served cold, super refreshing. In this case, I went with the iced tea route, since this is kind of like my take on a Southern sweet tea, but using ingredients and flavors that I grew up with.

For the palm sugar simple syrup:
2.5oz palm sugar
4oz water
.25oz kecap manis

In a pot, bring everything to a simmer until the sugar is fully dissolved into the water.

For the mugicha:
1oz mugicha leaves(or 4 bags of this brand)
32oz water
simple syrup

In a pot, heat up the mugicha in the water on low heat for 5 minutes. Allow the tea to steep in the liquid, off heat, for another 10 minutes before straining out the bags – be sure not to squeeze the bag, as the more intensified liquid has a bitter, astringent aftertaste. Mix the simple syrup into the tea and refrigerate the liquid for at least another 30 minutes before serving.