Cascara Coffee Cherry Tea

Twelve years ago, Ricardo Pérez Barrantes and the brothers Marvin and Felipe Rodriguez, opened the micro mill in Llano Bonito de Naranjo so they could provide full traceability and highest quality processing for their own coffee crops. In the past years, Ricardo has been working with the University of Costa Rica to develop a new way to do Cascara, a coffee cherry tea. Cascara is a dried fruit tea made from the coffee cherry that we love drinking over ice all summer long! In the washed coffee process, the first step is to remove the seed (which is the coffee “bean”) from the cherry with a de-pulper. Normally, this skin is considered waste, or a byproduct of coffee processing. It is usually composted for use as a natural fertilizer in the farm later in the season. To create this tea, the pulp is collected, and washed and then laid out to dry. Cascara, which means skin or peel in Spanish, is a relatively new product in Central America, though it has been consumed for centuries in Ethiopia