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How-To Guide

Roasted Barley Coffee — Roasting Your Own Caffè d'Orzo

The coffee that is not coffee

Walk into a bar in Italy and ask for an orzo and you get something that looks exactly like an espresso, arrives in the same cup, and is made from roasted barley. Caffè d'orzo is not a novelty there and it is not a health fad. It is a normal thing to order, it has been on the menu for generations, and children and adults drink it in the afternoon without anybody remarking on it.

It belongs to a much older and wider tradition. Roasted grain and roasted roots have stood in for coffee wherever coffee was expensive, rationed or unavailable: barley, rye, chicory, acorns, dandelion root, whatever was to hand. Most of those were compromises made under duress. Barley is the one that stuck around after the shortage ended, because it is genuinely good.

It is also, from a roasting point of view, one of the most interesting things you can put in a drum, and one of the least documented. There is plenty written about how to brew it. There is almost nothing written about how to roast it.

Why roast your own

The commercial product is fine, and it is roasted to one profile: very dark, very uniform, aimed at a cup that reads as close to coffee as possible. That is a reasonable target for a factory and a narrow one for you.

Roast your own and the whole range opens up. Stop earlier and the cup is maltier and sweeter, with a bread-and-toast character behind it. Take it further and it turns roasty, bitter and much more coffee-like. Take it further still and it goes ashy, which you will also want to do once so that you know where the edge is. None of those are available in a tin.

The other reasons are practical. Barley is inexpensive and sold everywhere. There is no caffeine in it at all, which is the whole point for a lot of people and means a cup at nine in the evening is not a decision. And it is an excellent way to learn the dark end of grain roasting on a product where a slightly overcooked batch costs you almost nothing.

Which barley to buy

Pearled barley from a supermarket is the usual starting point. It is cheap, widely available and consistent, and it has already had the hull removed, which means less chaff and less smoke in the drum. Hulled barley works too and carries a bit more husk character.

Malted barley is a different drink. It has been germinated and kilned before you get it, so it starts sweeter and roasts to something rounder and maltier at the same colour. Both are worth trying. Unmalted pearled barley gives the cleaner, drier, more coffee-like result that most people are after when they search for barley coffee.

Whichever you choose, it is small. Which brings us to the equipment problem.

Get the mesh right or you will lose the batch

Pearled barley is small, smooth and rounded, and it goes straight through a standard coffee drum. A drum perforated 3/16" is built to hold coffee beans, and barley is not a coffee bean. What happens is that the fines and the smaller kernels start dropping onto the burner within the first minute, they burn there, and the smoke comes back up through the grain you still have.

The 1/16" mesh is the right choice — small grains such as quinoa and barley are exactly what that option exists for. It holds the grain and still lets air, smoke and dust move out of the bed. Mesh and hole size goes through the full decision if you are ordering a drum for more than one product.

How dark to take it

Further than most people expect on their first attempt, and the aroma will tell you when you are close.

Through the middle of the roast, barley smells like bread. That is the amber region, and if you stop there you have made something pleasant that does not taste much like coffee. Keep going and the smell changes character fairly abruptly — the bakery note drops away and something darker and distinctly roasty takes its place. That transition is your landmark. The cup you are looking for lives past it.

In colour terms you are heading for the same deep brown to nearly black that a dark coffee roast shows, which puts you at the hot, fast end of the range described in grain roasting temperature and time. Two things follow from that.

First, the last stretch moves quickly. Colour development accelerates as the temperature climbs, so the gap between the roast you wanted and an acrid one is well under a minute. This is not a place to go and check your phone. Watching product temperature rather than the clock is what makes it repeatable, and it is the whole argument for treating the dark end as its own discipline.

Second, it smokes. Properly. Dark barley produces real volume of strong-smelling smoke, which is why this is an outdoor job and why people who have been happily oven-roasting pale malt indoors give up the first time they try to make orzo in the kitchen.

Do this on your first session: roast three small batches and stop each one a little further along than the last. Grind and brew all three. You will find your preference in an afternoon, and you will have a stopping temperature to aim at from then on.

Cool it fast, and rest it

A dark batch is carrying a lot of heat when it comes out, and it will carry on darkening in the bowl if you let it. Spread it thin and move air through it — the difference between the colour you called and the one you end up with is decided in the first two minutes, as cooling roasted grain covers. Then leave it a day or two before brewing. Freshly roasted grain, like freshly roasted coffee, is still gassing off and does not show its best immediately.

Grinding and brewing it

Grind and brew it like coffee, with two adjustments.

Roasted barley is brittle in a way coffee is not. It shatters rather than fracturing cleanly, so the same grinder setting produces noticeably more fine dust than it would with beans. Start a step or two coarser than you would for the same brewer and work back from there if the cup is thin.

The traditional route in Italy is the stovetop moka pot, and it suits the drink well. Drip and French press are both forgiving and a good place to start. Espresso machines will pull it, but the puck behaves differently under pressure because of those fines, so expect to spend some time on the grind before it runs properly. Begin at whatever dose and ratio you use for coffee and adjust from there; extraction is quicker than you might assume.

Store it as you would coffee — whole, sealed, out of the light, and ground fresh. Roasted grain goes flat and cardboardy after a few weeks in an open bag.

One thing worth saying plainly because people assume otherwise: barley contains gluten. Caffè d'orzo is caffeine-free, not gluten-free, and it is not a suitable drink for anyone avoiding gluten.

What to roast it on

A drum on your grill gives you the three things this particular roast needs: continuous tumbling so a fast dark roast comes out one colour instead of four, somewhere to read the temperature of the grain while it runs, and all that smoke outdoors where it belongs. Order it with the 1/16" mesh and it will handle quinoa, small malts and everything else on the grain roasting list as well.

See the drum roasters we build for grain.

Common questions

Does barley coffee contain caffeine?

No. Roasted barley has no caffeine in it at all, which is why caffè d'orzo is drunk in the evening and served to children in Italy. It does contain gluten, though, so it is not a substitute for anyone avoiding that.

How dark should barley be roasted for coffee?

Dark, and further than most people go first time. Keep roasting past the point where it smells of bread until the aroma turns properly roasty, which lands you around the colour of a dark coffee roast. Stopping earlier gives a maltier, sweeter cup that is pleasant but much less coffee-like.

What kind of barley makes the best coffee substitute?

Plain pearled barley is the usual choice: cheap, easy to find, low in chaff and consistent from bag to bag. Hulled barley brings a little more husk character, and malted barley makes a rounder, sweeter drink. All three are worth a batch.

Can I grind roasted barley in a coffee grinder?

Yes, but go coarser than your usual setting. Roasted grain is brittle and shatters rather than fracturing cleanly, so it throws far more fines than coffee does at the same setting, which can choke a filter or an espresso puck.

Why does homemade barley coffee taste better than the supermarket kind?

Mostly because you control where the roast stops. Commercial grain coffee is roasted to one very dark profile aimed at imitating coffee as closely as possible, while roasting your own lets you find the point between malty and roasty that you actually like. Freshness accounts for the rest.

Keep reading

Where the roast ends

We build roasters. What you do with the grain afterwards — mashing, brewing, distilling, baking, blending a grain bill — is its own craft and a deep one, and it is not ours. Unlike coffee, there is no single authority we can hand you to: brewing knowledge lives in forums and clubs rather than with one gatekeeper.

That gap is why we wrote these pages. Ask us about drums, mesh sizes, grills, burners, motors, thermocouples, batch sizes, or why half your barley came out two shades darker than the rest, and you have our full attention.

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