Cascara / Refreshment in the style of the Arabian Nights
Cascara is the husk of the coffee bean. When it dries, they make an exotic drink from it, the taste of which is more like tea. It has a noticeable taste of rosehip tea or hibiscus. It contains caffeine, but it depends on the type of cascara.
Cascara experts use the term coffee cherry.
Farmers no longer use the husks as fertilizer or fuel for dryers. There's a new way to use it, one that will once again fill their customers' taste buds. Drying the peels is difficult and susceptible to the effects of weather, mold or pests. The coffee trees on which the fruits grow should not be chemically treated and ideally should be part of an organic plantation. However, that is the concern of the growers, we are interested in how to deal with the peel from the coffee cherry.
Let's look for history in Yemen for quishri, which was prepared on the rocks by the Red Sea to refresh merchants and sailors from coffee husks, ginger and cinnamon. Not only during the hot Arabian nights, coffee refreshment was a rescue from the depression caused by the heat.
Cascara was a forbidden drink for a while, today it reaches the tables of restaurants and bars in Europe in a variety of forms - from hot drinks, alcoholic mixed drinks, to cold form, it also reaches coffee enthusiasts as an energy bar or baking flour. In addition, coffee flour does not threaten part of the population with gluten, it simply does not contain it.
Allegedly, the best cascara can be enjoyed in Panama, a country where 75,000 60-kilogram sacks of coffee were produced last year. Traditionally, large coffee growers also became good sellers of cascara. Brazil, Indonesia, Colombia or Vietnam are the parents of the most developing business in the field of snacks. We will pay close attention to it on the Slovak market as well, in the offer and maybe the Slovaks will come to their own versions of cascara - do you have any idea? :-)