The word Cascara means skin, peel or shell in Spanish, and in the world of specialty coffee refers to the outer layer of a coffee cherry. You obtain it after the extraction of the coffee beans from the coffee cherry; it is the pulp that is sun-dried.

These dried bags of coffee cherries are not unlike bags of tea -the main visual difference is the pieces of cherries are slightly bigger than a tea leaf and have a leathery, woody look similar to dried raisins or the shell of a nut.

The neat part about this whole process is that not only does it allow for the coffee plant to be used in an alternative way, but it’s also eco-friendly. Normally coffee cherries are considered a by-product of the coffee-making process and are either discarded as waste or used as compost. Now these cherries are being reused to produce a unique drink of their own.

Coffee producing communities have in fact been drying and brewing cherry like this for centuries – possibly since before coffee seeds were first used. In Yemen, ‘Cascara’ tea is referred to as ‘Qishr’, a tea made with cascara, cinnamon, ginger or caraway. In Ethiopia, it’s called ‘Geshar’ or ‘Hashara’, and its darkly roasted until almost black, and infused in water for a longer period to create an intensely fruity brew. In Bolivia it’s called ‘Sultana’, where they enjoy it with cinnamon, clove, and sugar.

Cascara is found somewhere at the intersection of coffee and tea, and although it comes from the coffee plant, the drink doesn’t taste anything like coffee.  You’re going to want to think of it as a very potent, fruity, herbal tea boasting notes of rose hip, hibiscus, cherry, mango or even tobacco. Altogether pretty balanced in taste, it does, however, offer notes of sharp acidity once ingested — it comes from coffee beans, after all…

In a sense, it tastes a lot more like the natural coffee cherry than coffee itself does, The bean undergoes a long process before it is roasted and consumed whereas cascara is a lot closer to coffee as found in nature.

In the post “Cascara and Caffeine” on the Square Mile Coffee Blog, co-founder Anette Moldvaer explains that they sent some cascara to a lab in Germany to test exactly how much caffeine the drink contains. Moldvaer reports: “As expected, [the] ratio of cascara to water has an impact on the caffeine content of the final beverage, while steep time seems to make little difference.” However, she continues, “Surprisingly, we found the caffeine content to be fairly low. Even at the strongest, longest brew, the caffeine content of cascara came in at 111.4 mg/L, compared to broad range of about 400-800 mg/L in brewed coffee.”
Cascara can definitely put some peps in your steps, but you still can consume more of it compared to regular coffee, without having to worry about having too much caffeine.