Cascara is the dried skin and pulp of the coffee cherry — the fruit that grows around the coffee bean — steeped in hot water and drunk like a tea. The word is Spanish for “husk”. Roasters sell it as coffee cherry tea; the cup tastes closer to hibiscus and raisin than to coffee, carries about a quarter of coffee's caffeine, and brews in under five minutes.
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.
You will see it under several names — cascara, cascara tea, cascara coffee, coffee cherry tea, sometimes coffee fruit. They all mean the same dried fruit. None of it is new: farmers at origin have brewed the cherry for centuries. What changed is that specialty roasters started shipping it alongside the beans and putting it on menus.
Not coffee, not quite tea
Cascara comes from the coffee plant, not the tea plant — no Camellia sinensis anywhere near it — yet it brews like a loose-leaf tea and drinks like one. The trade settles the contradiction by calling it a tisane: an infusion of dried fruit rather than tea leaf or ground seed. If you order it expecting coffee, the first sip will surprise you; if you expect a fruit tea, it lands exactly where it should.
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. Cold-brewed it leans cleaner and juicier — closer to a cordial than an infusion.
The fruit also explains more of coffee itself than most drinkers expect. A natural-process coffee tastes of blueberry because the bean dried inside its cherry. Taste cascara once and you understand half of what a process line on a coffee bag is telling you.
The caffeine, in numbers
Brewed cascara carries roughly a quarter of the caffeine of the same volume of brewed coffee — about the level of a black tea. The plant concentrates its caffeine in the seed, not the fruit, so even a long steep stays light. Dose and steep time move the number a little, never into coffee territory.
In practice: if an afternoon flat white keeps you up at night, an evening cup of cascara almost certainly will not.
How to brew cascara
Hot: 5 to 8 grams of dried cascara per 200 ml of water just off the boil (93–96°C), steeped four to five minutes, then strained. Anything that handles loose-leaf tea handles cascara — a teapot, a French press, an AeroPress with the plunger left out. Steep longer for a deeper, more raisined cup, though past about eight minutes it turns dry and tannic rather than sweet.
Cold: double the dose — around 10 to 15 grams per 200 ml — and steep 12 to 24 hours in the fridge, then strain. Cold is how cascara usually turns up on a cafe menu: served over ice, often topped with sparkling water, sometimes with a squeeze of citrus.
Where cascara comes from
Any coffee origin can produce it, but a handful treat it as a product rather than a byproduct, and Costa Rica leads. West Valley micromills dry cascara as a named lot alongside the coffee itself — Helsar de Zarcero, a micromill at Llano Bonito de Naranjo, is one of the mills that sells it under its own name. Since 2012, researchers at the University of Costa Rica have developed food-grade processing for it: the fresh skins are washed, pasteurized in a vapor chamber, then dehydrated, turning farm-gate scrap into a stable, sellable ingredient.
El Salvador, Panama, Colombia, Bolivia, and Guatemala ship it too, usually from the same farms whose beans already reach specialty menus — a Panama geisha producer or a Colombian micro-lot farm will sometimes offer the cascara from the same harvest.
The oldest version belongs to Yemen: qishr, coffee husks brewed with ginger and sometimes cinnamon, drunk for centuries in the households that first cultivated coffee. Everything on this page is a younger cousin of that cup.
The bean is the seed. Cascara is the fruit that fed it.
The name on the door
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, and the cellar takes the opposite view — where a bean grew, how it fermented, and what the fruit gave it as it dried are the point, not a footnote.
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, and sold as coffee cherry tea.
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 far less than coffee. Brewed cascara carries roughly a quarter of the caffeine of the same volume of brewed coffee, and below a brewed black tea. The plant concentrates its caffeine in the seed, not the fruit, so even a long steep stays light.
How do you brew cascara?
Like a loose-leaf tea: 5 to 8 grams of dried cascara per 200 ml of water just off the boil (93 to 96 degrees C), steeped four to five minutes, then strained. A teapot, French press, or AeroPress all work. For cold brew, double the dose and steep 12 to 24 hours in the fridge.
What does cascara taste like?
Not like coffee. Brewed cascara lands closer to a fruit tea: hibiscus, raisin, dried apple, and rosehip, with a honeyed sweetness and a light body. Cold-brewed it leans cleaner and juicier, and it is often topped with sparkling water over ice.
Where does cascara come from?
Any coffee origin can produce it, but Costa Rica is the most established source — West Valley micromills such as Helsar de Zarcero dry it as a named lot, and University of Costa Rica researchers have developed food-grade processing for it since 2012. El Salvador, Panama, Colombia, Bolivia, and Guatemala ship it too. The oldest tradition is Yemen's qishr, the spiced husk drink brewed for centuries.
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.