Every coffee bean starts life inside a bright red fruit called a coffee cherry. While most people toss these cherries aside to get to the beans inside, the fruit itself is completely edible—and surprisingly delicious.

Fresh coffee cherries taste nothing like the bitter, roasted coffee you drink. Instead, they're sweet and fruity, with a flavor profile often described as a combination of watermelon, rosewater, and hibiscus. Some people compare the taste to mango, raspberry, or red currant, with delicate floral notes that make each bite unexpectedly fragrant.

Why Don't We Eat More Coffee Cherries?

If they taste so good, why aren't coffee cherries everywhere? The answer is mostly practical. Coffee cherries are mostly skin and seeds—the pulp layer is thin and somewhat fibrous. They're also highly perishable and don't travel well, which makes them difficult to commercialize fresh.

Coffee farmers have traditionally viewed the cherry as a byproduct, discarding the fruit after harvesting the beans. But that's starting to change.

Cascara: The Dried Coffee Cherry Comeback

In recent years, cascara—the dried pulp of coffee cherries—has gained popularity as a sustainable way to use the whole fruit. Cascara can be brewed into a light, fruity tea that tastes like a cross between hibiscus tea and dried fruit, with subtle caffeine content.

The flavor of cascara is slightly different from fresh cherries, with notes of:

Dates and raisins
Watermelon and red currant
Jasmine and cinnamon
Mango and floral aromatics

It's a way to experience the coffee cherry's sweetness without needing access to fresh fruit, and it reduces waste in coffee production.

The Coffee Industry's Best-Kept Secret

For something so central to one of the world's most popular beverages, coffee cherries remain remarkably unknown. Most coffee drinkers never taste the fruit that started it all. That's a shame, because the experience is nothing like coffee—it's sweet, fragrant, and surprisingly refreshing.

If you ever visit a coffee farm during harvest season, don't pass up the chance to try a ripe cherry straight from the tree. It's a completely different side of coffee culture, one that's been hiding in plain sight for centuries.

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