A coffee cherry is mostly fruit. The seed we roast is the small part. The rest, the red skin and the sweet pulp around it, comes off at the pulper and is forgotten. A tonne of ripe cherry gives about 200 kilos of green coffee. The other 800 kilos is what this piece is about.
Cascara is that skin, dried and kept. Steeped in hot water it makes something that is not coffee and not tea. We sell one, a Panama Geisha cascara from Iris Estate, and since we started the same questions keep arriving at the roastery and on Instagram. What is it. Does it have caffeine. Is it safe. Why does it taste like hibiscus. And, from people in Kerala especially: why have we never seen this before, when coffee grows two hours up the ghat road?
What is cascara?
Cascara is the Spanish word for husk or peel. In coffee it means the dried skin of the coffee cherry, sometimes with a little pulp still attached. It comes off in one of two ways. At a wet mill, fresh cherry is pulped: the skin goes one way, the seed goes the other, and the skin is washed and dried. At a dry mill, whole cherries are sun-dried like raisins and the husk is cracked off weeks later. Either way you are left with a leathery, dark red flake that looks like a raisin someone stepped on.
It is not tea. Tea is Camellia sinensis. Cascara is a fruit infusion, the same family as hibiscus or dried apple. It is also not cascara sagrada, which is a tree bark sold as a laxative and shares nothing with coffee except a Spanish word. Worth knowing before you search for it.
Cascara is older than the name
Specialty coffee “discovered” cascara around 2009, when a Salvadoran producer named Aida Batlle began drying her cherry skins and selling them to roasters in the United States. Starbucks put a cascara latte on its menu in 2017 and the word went everywhere.
But farmers in Yemen and Ethiopia have been drinking the fruit for centuries, probably for longer than anyone has been roasting the seed. In Yemen it is qishr, boiled with ginger and sometimes cinnamon. In Ethiopia it is hashara. In parts of Harar, families still hull their dried coffee by hand in wooden mortars rather than send it to a mill, partly so the husk stays at home to be brewed. Cascara is a new label on an old drink. The label stuck because it was easier to sell. The drink is older than the marketing.
What does cascara taste like?
Like the fruit it came from, and not at all like coffee. The usual notes are hibiscus, tamarind, raisin, rosehip, dried apple, and a honey sweetness that arrives after the tartness. The body is heavier than tea, closer to a light juice. Cold, it drinks like a very good cordial without the sugar.
Exactly what it tastes like depends on the variety, the ripeness of the picking and how it was dried, the same way the seed does. A Robusta husk from a dry mill is woody and rough. A carefully picked Geisha cascara is a different thing altogether, which is why we started where we did.
How much caffeine is in cascara?
Less than most people expect, and less than most blog posts claim. The fruit carries some caffeine, but the seed holds most of it. A London roastery once sent brewed cascara to a lab in Germany to settle it. Even their strongest, longest brew came in at around 110 milligrams of caffeine per litre. Brewed coffee sits somewhere between 400 and 800. The ratio of cascara to water changed the caffeine; steep time barely did.
So a 250 ml cup of cascara, brewed the way we describe below, has roughly a fifth to a quarter of the caffeine of the same cup of coffee. Enough to notice at four in the afternoon. Not enough to keep you up.
Why most cascara is not worth drinking
This is the part the explainers skip. Coffee seeds are roasted at over 200°C, which deals with most of what the fruit picks up in the field. Cascara is only dried. Whatever is on the skin stays on the skin: dust, spray residue, the odd insect, and the mould that starts when wet fruit dries too slowly. Coffee cherry holds a lot of water and sun-drying takes days. In a wet harvest that is a real problem, and it is why a husk scooped from the heap behind a pulper is not something we would ever sell.
Good cascara is made on purpose. Only ripe cherries, hand-picked and sorted. Skins washed before drying. Dried fast and clean, on raised beds or in dehydrators, never on the ground. Sealed the moment it is dry. A mill in Costa Rica worked this out with a university a decade ago and set the standard: wash, steam, dehydrate. Very few producers go that far. When they do, the husk can fetch as much as the bean, and that is fair.
It is also why the “zero waste” story around cascara is only half true. Not every skin should become a drink. Most pulp belongs in compost, feeding the trees that grew it, and a farm that composts its pulp is not wasting anything. The cascara worth buying is the small fraction made with care.
Why we started with a Panama Geisha cascara
Geisha is the coffee variety that broke the auction records. Its seed is prized for jasmine, bergamot and stone fruit. The cherry that grows around that seed carries the same aromatics, and almost nobody gets to taste it.
Afterglow is Green Tip Geisha cascara from Iris Estate in Panama, grown by Jamison Savage, one of the producers who made Panama Geisha what it is. The ripe cherries are picked selectively, the skins are sun-dried, and what reaches us tastes of jasmine, apricot and honey. It is the fruit behind the most sought-after coffee in the world, and it costs a fraction of the seed.
We could have started with an Indian cascara. We chose not to, yet. We wanted the first cascara most people in Kerala tasted to be the clearest example we could find of what the fruit can be. Once you know what it should taste like, you can judge everything else.
Cascara in Kerala: the part of the kaapi we throw away
Kerala grows coffee, and has for nearly two centuries. Wayanad grows most of it and is one of the larger coffee districts in the country. Almost all of it is Robusta, dried whole as “cherry” and hulled later. The husk that comes off, dark and sweet-smelling, goes to mulch, into the fire, or onto a heap behind the huller. There is Arabica too, in Idukki, Nelliyampathy and the higher Wayanad estates, pulped wet in December and January. If you have driven past a pulping shed in season you know the smell: fruit, fermenting in a pile. That is the cascara, going back to the earth. So is the fruit of the tall, wild tree coffee we wrote about as Mara Kaapi.
None of that is wrong. Composted pulp is the best fertiliser those trees will get. But it means that in a state that has grown coffee for generations, almost nobody has tasted the fruit. Ask about cascara on a Wayanad estate and you will mostly get a blank look, and then a question about whether the husk is worth something now. A handful of estates across the border in Chikmagalur and Sakleshpur have started drying their own. As far as we know, nobody in Kerala has yet.
We think that will change. The husk is here. The sun is here for three months a year. And the drink is very close to something Kerala already loves.
A Kerala way to drink it
Kerala has drunk spiced coffee for generations. Chukku kaapi, black coffee boiled with dried ginger and sweetened with jaggery, is what you are handed when you have a cold, and what plenty of people drink every morning regardless. Qishr, the Yemeni cascara drink, is the same idea with the fruit instead of the seed: cherry husk, ginger, sometimes cinnamon, a little sweetness.
So this is how we drink Afterglow at the roastery when the rain sets in.
Kozhikode qishr
- 8 g cascara
- A thumbnail of chukku (dried ginger), lightly crushed
- A small piece of sharkkara (jaggery), or none
- 250 ml water, just off the boil
Put everything in a jar or a French press, pour the water over, cover, and wait eight minutes. Strain. The ginger warmth sits under the jasmine and apricot of the Geisha, and the jaggery rounds off the tartness. It tastes like something that should always have existed here.
How to brew cascara at home
Cascara is forgiving. There is no bitterness to avoid and no crema to chase, so the ratio and the time are only about how strong you like it. This is what we use.
Hot
- 8 g cascara to 250 ml water. A heaped tablespoon holds roughly 3 to 4 g, so two or three per cup is close enough.
- Water just off the boil, 95 to 98°C. The fruit needs heat; cooler water gives a thin cup.
- Steep 6 to 8 minutes in a French press, a Clever dripper, a teapot, or a jar with a strainer. Stir once halfway.
- Strain and drink. The same skins will take a second steep, a little lighter.
Cold brew
- 10 g cascara to 250 ml cold water in a closed jar.
- 12 to 18 hours in the fridge.
- Strain over ice. A squeeze of lime if you like.
Cascara soda
Brew it hot at double strength, 16 g to 250 ml, and let it cool. Fill a glass a third of the way, top with chilled soda water, add lime and a mint leaf, nothing else. It is the best thing we have found for a Calicut afternoon in May.
Keeping it in Kerala weather
Dried fruit pulls moisture out of the air, and Kozhikode air has plenty to give. Keep cascara in a sealed jar, away from the stove, and use a dry spoon. In the monsoon an open bag will soften within a week. Softened cascara still brews, but it loses the crisp, bright edge, and eventually it will mould. If it smells musty, do not drink it.
The dry skins can also be eaten, like a tart raisin, or scattered over curd or muesli. Ours is a little too precious for that. Try one anyway.
Cascara, briefly
Is cascara tea or coffee? Neither. It is the dried fruit of the coffee plant, brewed as an infusion. Think of it as a fruit tea that happens to come from coffee.
Does cascara have caffeine? A little. Roughly a fifth to a quarter of a cup of coffee, depending on how strong you brew it.
Is cascara safe to drink? Well-made cascara is. The risk with careless cascara is mould from slow drying, which is why we buy from a producer who dries it properly, and why you should keep yours sealed. Europe sorted out its rules for cascara in 2021 after years of confusion. In India it is sold openly by a handful of roasters, including us.
Can I make cascara from coffee at home? Only if you have ripe cherries, a clean way to remove the skin, and hot, dry weather for several days. Green beans and roasted coffee cannot become cascara; the fruit is already gone.
Where can I buy cascara in India? A few estates in Karnataka sell their own sun-dried cascara. For a Panama Geisha cascara, Afterglow is packed in Kozhikode and ships across India.
Afterglow is 50 g of Green Tip Geisha cascara from Iris Estate, Panama. Enough for about six cups, more if you steep twice. Not roasted, only dried. Packed in Kozhikode, shipped across India. It is here.
And if you grow coffee in Kerala and have thought about drying your own husk, write to us. We would like to taste it.
