Cascara: coffee cherry tea

A by-product with a long history

Sourced

When coffee is processed, the seed is separated from the fruit around it. In the natural process the whole cherry is dried and the husk is hulled off afterwards; in washed processing the pulp is stripped off wet. Either way the fruit is a leftover, and most of it becomes compost or waste. Cascara is what results when that fruit is dried cleanly and kept for drinking.

Drinking it is not an invention of the specialty trade. When the European Union authorised it for sale, the regulation recorded a history of safe use as food in Yemen, Ethiopia and Bolivia. In Yemen the husks are brewed with spices as qishr, a drink with its own place in the country's coffee culture.

Brewing it

Widely documented

1. Treat it as a tea, not a coffee. No grinder and no brewer are needed. A teapot, a French press or a mug and a strainer will do.
2. Use water a little off the boil. Pour hot water over the dried fruit. It is bulky and light, so it takes noticeably more by volume than tea leaves would.
3. Steep for several minutes, then taste. It gives up its flavour slowly. Start at around four minutes and taste; a longer steep is fuller and, past a point, tannic and drying.
4. Strain and drink, hot or cold. It is good hot, and many people prefer it steeped strong and poured over ice. It also cold-steeps well in the fridge overnight.

Sellers print very different quantities on the packet, and none is standard. Start from theirs and adjust by taste.

It does contain caffeine

Sourced

The fruit of the coffee plant contains caffeine, and so does a drink made from it. A cup of cascara generally carries less than a cup of brewed coffee, but how much depends on the cherries, how much is used and how long it steeps, and no single figure applies. It should be treated as a caffeinated drink.

European rules reflect that. Drinks made from it that contain more than 150 milligrams of caffeine per litre must carry the same warning as other high-caffeine drinks: not recommended for children or for pregnant or breast-feeding women.

Why it took time to appear in shops

Sourced

In the European Union, a food with no significant history of consumption in the bloc before 1997 needs authorisation before it can be sold. Cascara fell into that category, and for some years its status was unclear. It was authorised in January 2022, as a traditional food from a third country, for the dried cherry pulp of arabica and robusta coffee and for infusions made from it. On a label it is called coffee cherry pulp, or cascara (coffee cherry pulp).

Rules differ elsewhere, and anyone selling it should check the law where they trade. For drinking at home the practical point is simpler: buy cascara sold as a food. It is an agricultural by-product, and fruit dried for composting has not been handled as something to drink.

Things it is confused with

Widely documented

Cascara sagrada

An unrelated herbal product made from the bark of a buckthorn tree and used as a laxative. It shares only the Spanish word for husk or bark. If a product is sold as a supplement or mentions bark, it is not coffee cherry.

Coffee itself

Cascara does not taste of coffee. Nothing in it has been roasted, and the flavours people associate with coffee are created by roasting the seed.

A caffeine-free fruit tea

It looks and tastes like one, and is not. See the section above.

What to do next

• Yemeni qishr in the atlas — The oldest tradition of drinking the coffee husk, spiced and brewed in its own way.
• Coffee waste and by-products — What else is left over when coffee is processed, and what is done with it.
• Washed versus natural process — The two ways the fruit comes off the seed, which decide what the leftover fruit is like.
• Caffeine estimator — For the coffee side of your day's caffeine; cascara adds to it.