Cascara: The Coffee Cherry as a Drink

Cascara is a tea-like drink brewed from the dried skin and pulp of the coffee cherry — the fruit that's normally discarded once the beans inside are removed. The word is Spanish for "husk," and while specialty cafes have only recently taken an interest in it, it has been brewed as a drink in coffee-growing communities for generations.

What Is Cascara, Exactly?

During natural or washed processing, the skin and pulp that once surrounded the coffee bean are stripped away and, traditionally, left behind as waste or compost. Cascara is simply that fruit, collected instead of discarded, then dried in the sun until it looks like dark, papery raisin flakes. Costa Rica has become a center for turning cascara into a consistent, food-grade product: researchers at the University of Costa Rica have worked since 2012 on a process where fresh skins are washed, pasteurized with steam, and then dehydrated, aimed at making cascara safe and stable enough to sell commercially rather than just used informally on farms. For most of coffee's commercial history, this fruit was treated as processing waste, sometimes composted or left to rot near the mill, so its second life as a packaged, sellable product is a fairly recent shift in how producers think about what a coffee cherry is worth.

How Is Cascara Brewed?

Dried, flaked cascara is steeped much like loose-leaf tea, typically around three tablespoons per 10 to 12 ounces of water, for about four minutes in hot water or much longer, roughly 12 to 16 hours, as a cold brew. The resulting drink isn't coffee-flavored; brewed cascara is often described as tasting of hibiscus, raisin, dried apple and rosehip, with a honeyed sweetness and a light body, while cold-brewed versions tend to come out cleaner and juicier.

Where Does Cascara Come From Traditionally?

Yemen has the deepest documented tradition, where a spiced version called qishr, often brewed with ginger and sometimes cinnamon, has reportedly been drunk for centuries in the households that first cultivated coffee — by some accounts, cascara-style tea may even predate brewing the bean itself into what we now think of as coffee. In Yemen, that tradition sits alongside the country's long coffee-growing history more broadly. A related infusion is also long established in Bolivia, where it's commonly known as sultana, and Ethiopia has its own version, sometimes called hashara. These traditions developed independently of the recent specialty-coffee interest in cascara, which has mostly grown up around Central American producers looking for a use for fruit that would otherwise go to waste.

How Much Caffeine Is in Cascara?

Cascara does contain caffeine, since it comes from the same plant and fruit that surrounds the bean, but at a lower concentration than brewed coffee. It's generally described as having roughly a quarter of the caffeine of an equivalent volume of brewed coffee, putting it in a similar range to black tea rather than anywhere close to a cup of drip coffee.

Is Cascara Legal to Sell? The EU Novel Food Question

Because cascara wasn't a significant part of the European diet before 1997, it falls under the European Union's novel food rules, which require new-to-market foods to be formally evaluated before they can be sold widely. In 2022, at the European Commission's request, the European Food Safety Authority published a scientific opinion concluding that dried coffee husk from Coffea arabica is safe for its proposed uses as a novel food under EU Regulation 2015/2283 — a key step in clearing the way for cascara to be sold more broadly across the bloc. In the United States, cascara has been sold by specialty importers and cafes without the same kind of formal novel-food review process, since the US doesn't regulate new ingredients under an equivalent framework.

How Does Cascara Compare With Jamaica Blue Mountain?

The comparison here is more conceptual than direct, since cascara and Jamaica Blue Mountain come from the same plant but aren't really competing products: JBM is the roasted coffee bean itself, brewed for a cup widely described as mild and balanced, while cascara is brewed from the fruit that's normally removed before a bean like JBM is even processed. Any washed coffee, JBM included, generates cherry skins as a byproduct of processing, so in principle cascara could be made from Blue Mountain fruit the same way it's made elsewhere — but that's speculative, since Blue Mountain's business and reputation are built entirely around the bean rather than the fruit around it.