Our story
A specialty coffee cellar that learns.
Specialty coffee in Manila has the beans. It does not have a way to learn what your palate wants. You can read tasting notes for a year and still default to “I like it” or “I don’t.” Cascara starts there.
The founder, Gil Erez, has spent fifteen years building SaaS fintech across Europe and Asia. He is Chief Strategy Officer at Silver Lining, a SaaS platform for banks. Coffee is older than the company — years of home brewing, the same questions every weekend, no language to answer them. Cascara is what comes from staying with the question long enough to build something around it.
Three premises sit underneath the work:
- Specialty coffee discovery is broken.
- Palate is learnable.
- The Philippines is the right place to prove it.
Each is a claim the product has to earn.
What Cascara is
A members’ specialty coffee cellar in BGC, anchored to a palate-intelligence algorithm that learns what each member’s palate actually wants. The cellar is the flagship. The algorithm is the moat. One bean from each of four corners — Clean ○, Classic △, Fluid ◇, Experimental ✦ — every month.
What Cascara is not
Not a cafe chain. Not a roaster. Not a luxury brand. Not a third-wave coffee lecture. Not for everyone. One hundred Personal lockers. Thirty Corporate. Once full, waitlist only.
Where Cascara is now
Closed alpha is live. The first cohort is calibrating against six hundred beans from one hundred and eighty-eight roasters. Stage 1 — web — runs through 2026 Q3. Stage 2 — app — follows. Stage 3 — the cellar in BGC — opens 2027 Q2.
If any of this reads like the room you have been looking for, start with the calibration. Five minutes. Your palate profile.
Start calibrating →