What is Coffee Cherry Tea? What Does Cascara Mean? What's the Ideal Water Temperature for Brewing Coffee? How to Control Concentration?

Green tea, black tea, oolong—few things compare to these simple pleasures of everyday life!

As we all know, coffee is the seed of the coffee cherry. Roasted, it produces thousands of aromatic compounds—hence how delicious brewed coffee tastes. But did you know the fruit itself can be brewed too? In Europe and the Americas it goes by a resounding name—"Cascara"—while we tend to call it "coffee cherry tea."

What is Coffee Cherry Tea?

Coffee cherry skin comes, naturally, from coffee cherries—the fruit of the coffee tree. Because they turn such a deep red when ripe, they were named "coffee cherries."

Small as they look, their structure is quite complex. Processing green coffee isn't just about fermentation—it means stripping away everything surrounding the beans: the skin, pulp, mucilage, and parchment. The skin is, of course, the outermost layer of the fruit.

Generally, the skins removed during processing are used as fertilizer: mixed with other material and composted to nourish the coffee trees. But this puts demands on the skins. If they aren't thoroughly dried, or something goes wrong during processing (over-fermentation, for instance), they can develop very high acidity! Too much acidity "contaminates" the soil, pushing its pH the wrong way and doing more harm than good. Such skins can't be composted and simply become waste. Either way, the skins' value was minimal—until one day Aida Batlle, a Salvadoran coffee producer, caught the sweet aroma rising from sun-dried cherry skins: full sugarcane sweetness with a hint of calm rose fragrance. So she boldly tried brewing them! The result had none of coffee's bitterness, was intensely sweet, and carried a tea-like refreshing cleanliness. Coffee cherry tea was born—and Aida Batlle named it "Cascara," which means "skin, husk" in Spanish.

How Coffee Cherry Tea Is Made

Cascara transformed the value of cherry skins overnight, and more and more coffee farmers began producing and selling them. Cherry skins don't demand the long, fiddly processing that tea leaves do, but high-quality cascara still requires strict process control. Once the de-pulping machine strips the skins off the beans, they're laid out on drying beds for thorough drying. Workers must then hand-remove parchment, unripe beans, stones, twigs, and other impurities—the de-pulper has no sorting function; it just piles together everything stripped from the beans. The bean is the star, after all, not the skin. So hand-sorting is essential to guarantee the purity of the finished cascara.

The whole drying process typically lasts 4–5 days, depending on how generous the sunlight is. Ambient temperature and humidity matter too—just as they do for coffee beans. When it's too cold and too humid, cherry skins spoil easily. Normally the deep red of the skins gradually shifts to deep purple as drying progresses; spoiled skins, however, turn brown and develop a sharp sour taste—failed product. So vigilance during drying is critical: besides removing impurities, workers must also pick out any skins that turned brown from improper drying.

The Flavor Profile of Coffee Cherry Tea

What does it taste like? Different coffee varieties carry different base flavors thanks to genetics, and cherry skins are no exception. Skins from different varieties have their distinctions, but they all share one trait: sweetness.

No matter the variety, every cascara brews into abundant sweetness—perceptible even in the dry skins, since they're naturally loaded with sugars. FrontStreet Coffee has its own plantation, but since it isn't harvest season yet, our impatient team bought a batch of cherry skins online to sample! Brewing cascara is no different from brewing tea. For a quick hot cup, use slightly hotter water; adjust the water to taste. FrontStreet Coffee used 94°C water, 20g of cherry skins, and 400ml of water—a 1:20 ratio.

This batch came from Catimor. The brewed tea was sweet above all, with a faint red date aroma! As noted, it tastes almost purely sweet—truly deserving the nickname "little sweet water." But with only sweetness, the flavor layers are thin; something feels missing. Beyond hot brewing, cascara can also be steeped cold, like cold-brewed tea or cold brew coffee—long, low-temperature extraction. Cold-extracted cascara is even sweeter, but still just sweet. That's why many cafés, though they sell cascara drinks, usually blend it with other ingredients to build specialty drinks with richer, more layered flavors.

One last bonus: cascara's caffeine content is only one-quarter that of coffee—so for anyone who wants a gentle lift without overdoing the caffeine, coffee cherry tea is an excellent choice.

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FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

Cascara's charm is all about balanced, gentle sweetness—and the same logic guides FrontStreet Coffee's medium roast lineup. If you dislike both sourness and bitterness, our Brazil Queen Estate (yellow Bourbon from the world's largest coffee-producing country) delivers creamed peanut, chocolate, toast, and sugarcane sweetness with a mellow, gentle profile. The Jamaica Blue Mountain No.1, medium roasted to fuse acidity, bitterness, sweetness, and body into one elegant whole, offers chocolate, roasted nuts, cream, and caramel in a cup no other coffee quite matches.

For a sweeter, fruitier medium roast, try the Strawberry Candy Gesha Blend—Costa Rican honey process joined with Panamanian washed Gesha—whose orange-honey aroma and rounded sweetness work beautifully for pour-over, espresso, or cold brew, and pair wonderfully with a pot of cascara tea. And the 2013 Yunnan natural Typica brings nuts, brown sugar, black tea, and dried apricot—a warm, everyday cup from China's specialty coffee heartland.