Cascara Coffee Cherry Tea

Cascara is the dried skin and pulp of the coffee cherry, the red fruit that grows around every coffee bean. Steeped in hot or cold water, it makes a deep red tea that tastes of dried fruit and flowers. In Yemen the same husks are simmered with warm spices and called qishr.

Origin & Story

Every coffee bean begins inside a fruit. The coffee cherry has a thin red skin, a layer of sweet pulp and, inside, usually two seeds that become the beans. When the beans are processed, the skin and pulp are normally left over as waste. Dried and sold on, they become cascara, from the Spanish word for husk, peel or skin.

Yemen got there first. The Arabic word for the husk is qishr, and in Yemen it also names a drink: the dried husks simmered with ginger and cinnamon, and sometimes other spices, a hot cup also called husk coffee. The European Food Safety Authority, reviewing the history of use, dates husk infusions in Yemen to the 16th century. In Ethiopia a similar drink is called hashara, and in Bolivia the drink is called sultana.

The modern craze for cascara is recent. Around 2005 the Salvadoran coffee farmer Aida Batlle noticed that the husks of her coffee smelled floral and tried brewing them as tea, and by about 2009 cascara was turning up in American coffee shops. In the European Union it counted as a novel food, so it needed approval before it could be sold. That came in January 2022, when the EU authorized dried coffee cherry pulp and its infusion as a traditional food from a third country, a route that rests on a long record of use outside Europe.

In the cup, cascara is closer to a fruit tea than to coffee. It is described as fruity and floral, in the way of dried apricots, cranberries and raisins, with a bright tartness. It does contain caffeine, but far less than the bean: analyses cited in the EU safety opinion put the dried husk at about 1.4 to 6.5 mg per gram.

Steep 6 g of dried cascara in 240 ml of water at 95°C for four to five minutes, strain, and serve it hot or over ice.

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