Our storyGood energy found
Good energy found
in an unexpected place.
We built a drink around the part of the coffee cherry that almost never gets used.
How it started
I’ve spent a decade working in coffee, so cascara wasn’t new to me. But knowing about something and seeing it work are two different things.
That happened back in Australia. Cascara iced tea was one of our favourite things to order at a café we went to all the time — and we’d get one whenever it wasn’t sold out.
I’ve never been a big fan of synthetic energy drinks. I’d always reach for coffee instead. But I liked the idea of something else entirely: a refreshing afternoon pick-me-up.
Back in the UK I couldn’t find one. For a long time you couldn’t easily make one either — cascara only became approved for sale as a food across the EU in 2022. Once that changed, I started developing OUTLYR with the food technologists at Queen Margaret University’s Scottish Centre for Food Development & Innovation.
80%is cascara
- SkinThe outer cherry. Red when ripe.
- PulpSweet fruit flesh. Skin and pulp together are cascara.
- MucilageThe sticky layer. Sugar, and where fermentation happens.
- ParchmentA papery shell around the seed.
- BeanThe seed. The only part the coffee trade keeps.
Coffee is a fruit
We only ever use the seed. Cascara is everything around it — the dried skin and fruit of the coffee cherry.
Depending on how the coffee is processed, that fruit accounts for somewhere around 39–45% of the cherry by weight. Add in everything else stripped away along the way and only about a fifth of what gets picked ends up as green coffee.
The rest has historically been treated as waste.
An old idea
Cascara isn’t a new invention. In Yemen it has been brewed as qishr for centuries — the dried cherry husk, often with ginger or cinnamon, drunk long before anyone in Europe thought to roast the seed and throw the rest away. Versions of the same drink turn up across Ethiopia and Bolivia under different names.
Nobody discovered cascara. The coffee trade just spent a century deciding it was rubbish. We think that was a mistake, and the drink in your hand is the argument.
Why we think it matters
We work in an industry that spends a lot of time trying to be less wasteful. This felt like a straightforward place to start.
- 01Nothing extra grownCascara needs no new land, no new trees and no extra water. It already grew, on a harvest that already happened.
- 02Less left to rotCoffee pulp is wet and perishable. Piled up at the mill it breaks down and releases methane, and can leach into local waterways.
- 03More value per harvestDried and sold, it becomes a second product from the same picking — rather than something a producer pays to get rid of.
What’s in the coffee fruit
- Natural caffeineCascara brings its own caffeine — it grew on the same plant as the bean. How much varies from harvest to harvest, so we top it up with natural caffeine from green coffee beans to keep every can consistent. Nothing synthetic, either way.
- PolyphenolsCoffee fruit is full of polyphenols — the plant compounds most people know as antioxidants, from the same family found in green tea, cocoa and berries.
- Plant fibreLike any fruit, the coffee cherry contains natural plant fibre — the pectins that make fruit set into jam.
These describe the coffee fruit itself. For what’s in the can, see the nutritionals on each product page.
How it stacks up
Caffeine per can
- OUTLYR80mg
- Black coffee~95mg
- Typical energy drink80–160mg
Enough to do something. Not enough to undo you.
Sugar per can
- OUTLYR3.5g
- Typical energy drink27g
Lower is the whole point — 85% less than the aisle standard.
Calories per can
- OUTLYR25 kcal
- Typical energy drink100+ kcal
Fewer calories to justify to yourself at 3pm.
So what does it taste like?
Most people have never tried cascara, which is half the appeal. On its own it sits closer to a fruit tea than to coffee — blackberry, cherry and blackcurrant, with a light dryness to it.
Cascara is the headline here; it’s the reason the drink exists. But it isn’t the loudest thing in the can. The fruit does the flavouring — lemon and yuzu, or mango and passionfruit — and the cascara sits underneath, adding a gentle sweetness and a clean, tea-like finish. It’s what stops it tasting like a typical energy drink.
From cherry to can
- 01The cherry is pickedA coffee farm harvests fruit. That is what a coffee cherry is — a fruit, grown for the two seeds at its centre.
- 02The fruit is stripped offThe seed goes to be roasted. The skin and pulp — around 80% of the cherry — is separated and, traditionally, left to rot or spread as mulch.
- 03It’s dried, not dumpedOurs is laid out and dried like any other fruit, because that is exactly what it is. Drying is what makes it keep, and what concentrates the flavour.
- 04We brew itSteeped like a tea. It gives up its own naturally occurring caffeine and a dry, gently sweet, almost hibiscus-like liquor.
- 05Into the canBlended with real fruit juice and lightly carbonated. Nothing synthetic goes in after this point.
On sourcing
Cascara is seasonal and supply is genuinely limited, so where ours comes from may move as we grow. That means the drink can shift a little between batches — a different harvest, a slightly different character. We think that’s a feature. It’s what happens when your ingredient is a crop rather than a formulation.