Editorial · Fundamentals

What is cascara?
The cherry, the tea, and the name.

GEGil Erez · Cascara Editorial7 August 2026 · 4 min read

The fruit around the bean

Coffee is a fruit. The bean you grind is the seed of a small red cherry, and cascara is everything around that seed — the skin and pulp, dried and kept instead of thrown away. The word is Spanish for “husk”. It names two things worth knowing: the ingredient, and the cellar that borrowed its name.

The part of the cherry that gets thrown away.

Every coffee you have ever tasted started as a cherry on a tree. Processing — washed, natural, honey — is mostly the story of separating the seed from that fruit. In almost every case the fruit is the byproduct: composted, used as fertilizer, or simply discarded. Cascara is the exception. The skins are collected after pulping and dried in the sun until they look like large, dark raisin flakes.

None of this is new. Farmers at origin have brewed the fruit for centuries — Yemen's qishr, a spiced coffee-husk drink, is older than most of the ways you have had coffee itself. What changed is that specialty roasters started shipping the dried fruit alongside the beans and putting it on menus.

What it tastes like.

Not like coffee. Brewed cascara lands closer to a fruit tea: hibiscus, raisin, dried apple, rosehip, with a honeyed sweetness and a light body. There is caffeine, but a fraction of what the seed carries — the plant concentrates it in the bean. It steeps like loose-leaf tea, holds up to cold brewing, and is often served sparkling over ice.

The bean is the seed. Cascara is the fruit that fed it.

Why a coffee cellar is named after it.

Cascara is also the name of a members' specialty coffee cellar in BGC, Manila. The name is deliberate. Most of the industry treats the fruit as waste and the seed as the product; the cellar takes the opposite view — that what happened around the bean is the point. Where it grew, how it fermented, what the fruit gave it as it dried. The cellar tracks all of it, and matches beans to your palate rather than to a trend.

The fruit shows up in the cup more than most drinkers expect. A natural-process coffee tastes of blueberry because the bean dried inside its cherry. Understand cascara and you understand half of what a process line on a coffee bag is telling you.

Start from the fruit.

The cellar carries hundreds of beans, each mapped by origin and process. Less than a minute of calibration tells you which corner of the catalog your palate lives in.

Start calibrating →

Common questions.

What is cascara?

Cascara is the dried skin and pulp of the coffee cherry — the fruit that grows around the coffee bean. The word is Spanish for 'husk' or 'shell'. After the beans are removed during processing, the fruit is usually discarded; cascara is that fruit, kept and dried instead.

Is cascara coffee or tea?

Neither, strictly. It brews like a tea — dried fruit steeped in hot water — but it comes from the coffee plant, not the tea plant. The trade calls it a tisane or coffee-cherry tea. The cup tastes closer to hibiscus, raisin, and dried apple than to coffee.

Does cascara have caffeine?

Yes, but much less than coffee. A cup of brewed cascara typically carries a fraction of the caffeine of the same volume of brewed coffee — the caffeine concentrates in the seed, not the fruit. It sits closer to a light tea.

How do you brew cascara?

Like a loose-leaf tea: roughly 5 to 8 grams of dried cascara per 200 ml of hot water, steeped for four to five minutes, then strained. It also cold-brews well overnight and is often served sparkling over ice.

Why is the coffee cellar called Cascara?

Cascara is the part of the coffee cherry most of the industry throws away — the fruit that fed the bean. The cellar is named after it because the name points at the whole fruit, not just the seed: origin, process, and everything that happened before roasting.

What is cascara?The cherry, the tea, and the name.