Tasting notes: Honey, raisin, cherry, red currant, velvety body

Cascara is an herbal tea made from the dried coffee cherry skins after the seeds (beans) are removed. Some say that long ago, people made cascara even before they discovered coffee beans could be roasted and brewed.  In Spanish, cascara means ‘husk’ or ‘peel.’ The tea has a naturally sweet, crisp and refreshing taste with about 25-50% of the caffeine that’s in a cup of coffee (depending on how strong you brew it).  Cascara is rarely exported and has a long history of being consumed in coffee producing nations (it’s called qishr in Yemen).

Brewing instructions:

This tea brews with almost the same proportions we recommend with our coffee, but cascara is much more forgiving than coffee is, so consider it an open recipe. A tea infuser or any other vessel will work too, just strain and serve when done.

These are general brewing outlines, use this as a starting point and adjust as needed - cascara brewing is much more forgiving than coffee:

Hot water brewing instructions:
14g (about 3 tablespoons) per 8oz water
56g (about 12 tablespoons) per 34oz water [standard french press]

Cold brew instructions:
2.25oz cascara per 34oz water [standard french press]
9oz cascara per gallon of water

Cascara brews much like an herbal tea would, and a french press works very well for brewing. Combine your hot water (about 205F) and cascara into a french press and brew for at least 5 minutes; stirring multiple times will improve the flavor.  Unlike coffee, the cascara will not overbrew if it brews beyond 4 minutes (you may even like the taste better).

There’s a wide range of info about how much caffeine is in cascara, most of which is anecdotal.  A coffee company in England wanted to end the debate, so they sent a cascara sample to a facility that decaffeinates coffee (because they have technology to measure caffeine).  What they found is that if brewed at 20g/liter, it has about 25% of the caffeine of a cup of coffee. The (hot) recipe we have listed below has about 2.5x their test sample, so our recipe would have about 60% the caffeine of a cup of coffee.