The coffee cherry is the fruit of the coffee plant and contains the coffee beans as seeds. The flesh is sweet, edible, and can be dried and brewed as cascara tea.

What Is a Coffee Cherry and Is It Edible?

The coffee cherry is the fruit of the coffee plant and contains the coffee beans as seeds. The flesh is sweet, edible, and can be dried and brewed as cascara tea.

Why that matters

What we call a “coffee bean” is botanically the seed of a stone fruit — the coffee cherry. Each cherry normally contains two seeds lying flat against each other. The cherry ripens over 6–11 months on the shrub, changing colour from green through yellow to red (in some varieties to yellow or orange when ripe).

The flesh of the coffee cherry is thin but sweet — with a flavour reminiscent of a mix of rosehip and cranberry. It’s edible and in growing countries is sometimes snacked on straight from the shrub. In commercial coffee production, the flesh is removed during processing and was long considered waste.

In recent years, the dried flesh has been marketed as “cascara” — a tea-like infusion with a fruity aroma. Cascara contains caffeine, generally less than coffee and comparable to black tea (roughly 25–40 mg per cup). In the EU, its sale was long in a regulatory grey area, as cascara was classified as a “novel food.” Since 2022, cascara has been approved as a food in the EU.

How the coffee cherry is processed — the way the flesh is separated from the seed — is one of the most important factors influencing a coffee’s flavour. Washed coffees (flesh removed immediately) taste cleaner and more acidic. Natural coffees (bean dries inside the cherry) absorb fruit sugars and taste sweeter, more berry-like.

At Green Wall Coffee

At our café on Sophienstraße 27 in Berlin-Lichtenberg, we occasionally offer cascara — as an alternative for guests looking for lower-caffeine hot drinks with a coffee connection. At the counter, I enjoy explaining that the coffee bean is actually a fruit pit. That surprises nearly every guest and changes how they see the drink in their cup.

Related Questions

• What is coffee, exactly – plant, bean, or beverage?
• How many years until a coffee plant bears fruit?
• What is washed processing?

More depth on this topic in the article How to Make Perfect Espresso. Or stop by at Sophienstraße 27 — Mon–Fri 8am–5pm, Sat 10am–5pm.