When most people hear the word “coffee”, they probably imagine a cup of hot dark beverage which helps them overcome daily struggles, or maybe they see dark, roasted beans infront of their eyes. Very few people imagine a red, berry-shaped fruit.
Botanically, the fruit of coffee is considered a berry or a drupe. The pulp is naturally sweet and has been used to create a beverage abundant in caffeine, vitamins and anti-oxidants long before people
first started experimenting with roasted coffee beans. The name itself -
cascara - came from Spanish, meaning “fruit peel”. Other traditional names are for example
qishr (in Yemen) or
sultana (in Bolivia) where it is drunk with a pinch of cinnamon and ginger.
After the discovery of roasted coffee beans, the use of other parts of the coffee plant went down drastically. The pulps were most often used as fertilizer. Only in recent decades, cascara has started re-emerging as a consumable part of the plant. There are
two ways cascara can be removed from the fruit - either using a specialised machine, or after a long drying process of the entire fruit. The second way is gentler to the pulp and thus the resulting cascara is of higher quality.
The taste is often compared with rose hip tea, rooibos or red currant with notes of tobacco. But in general, the tastes of cascara can be as diverse as tastes of coffee beans, differing according to the variety of the coffee plant, climate conditions, soil, etc. This makes it a perfect alternative for tea, which allows you to discover countless new tastes in beverages.
No special equipment is needed for brewing cascara. The pulps can simply be extracted whole in a cup, or separated by a sieve or frenchpress to simplify the process. The recommended amount is 15 to 20 grams in half a liter of boiling water, extracted for 5 to 10 minutes. You can experiment with the process in order to reach the perfect taste intensity for you. You can also prepare a cascara cold brew, meaning you put it in cold water and let it extract overnight. Cascara pairs perfectly with aforementioned ginger and cinnamon, but also with orange juice or honey. Try them all and decide which one can best warm up your heart.
