Cascara
The dried skin and pulp of the coffee fruit, brewed in Yemen and Ethiopia for centuries and revived by the specialty coffee trade under a Spanish name. It contains caffeine, it is the coffee plant’s other drink, and it tastes almost nothing like coffee.
Identity
- Botanical name
- Coffea arabica
- Family
- Rubiaceae
- Part used
- Fruit
- Origin
- Highland Ethiopia for the species; the drink is documented as a domestic practice in Yemen and Ethiopia and the modern trade sources it from coffee origins worldwide
- Drunk in
- Yemen, Ethiopia, Bolivia, Costa Rica
Character
Sweet-sour and dried-fruity — raisin, tamarind and rosehip — with a light tannic grip and essentially nothing of coffee about it. Yemeni qishr, spiced and sweetened, is a different drink again.
Notes: raisin, hibiscus, tamarind, rosehip
History
In Yemen, qishr — the husk simmered with ginger and sometimes cinnamon — is an older drink than the roasted bean is in Europe, and it remains the everyday preparation in parts of the country while the bean is exported. The Western cascara trade dates from the 2010s, when producers found a market for a by-product previously composted; European novel-food rules treated it as a new food rather than a traditional one, which held up its sale in the EU for several years.
How it is drunk
In Yemen qishr is made in a pot with sugar and ginger and served in small glasses, in the same social slot coffee occupies elsewhere; the husk is the cheap part of the crop and the drink is an everyday one. In Ethiopia the husk drink has its own regional names. In specialty coffee bars it is served hot, iced or carbonated, and priced as a curiosity.
Production
Skin and pulp are separated from the seed during processing and dried. Drying it to a stable moisture without mould is the difficult part, and a large share of the world’s coffee husk is unfit to drink because it was dried as waste rather than as food. Cascara worth buying comes from producers who decided in advance that it was a product.
Preparation
Infusion · Cold infusion · Decoction
Herbal infusion (tisane)
1–2 g/100 ml · 90–95 °C · 5 min
Category-typical practice rather than a measurement for this specific botanical. Most infusions are far more tolerant of a long steep than tea is.
Caffeine: The dried fruit carries caffeine, at a lower level than the roasted seed of the same plant. TeaHQ publishes no figure: reported values vary widely with variety, processing and brew strength, and none has a basis a single number could honestly represent.
What gets confused
The name is the problem. “Cascara” is simply Spanish for husk, and it is used for coffee fruit skin, for cacao husk (cáscara de cacao, which TeaHQ holds separately), and for cascara sagrada, the bark of the unrelated North American Rhamnus purshiana. Buying by that word alone is how the wrong plant arrives.
Common mistakes
- Brewing it at coffee strength. It is a dried fruit and behaves like one.
Evidence for this page
This page is TeaHQ synthesis throughout. No external source stands behind any statement on it, including the botanical name. 132 of the 204 botanicals have had their names and distribution checked against a taxonomic authority and this is not one of them.
Brewing parameters here are typical practice for the category rather than measurements of this plant, and each set says so.
This page makes no safety claim. It describes what Cascara is, where it comes from and how it is prepared — not what it does to a person. The absence of a safety note here is not a statement that the plant is safe. How TeaHQ handles this.