This cocktail happened the way so many others do: with the arrival of some Panamanian cascara.
Oh, you don't know it? Cascara, a tea that's derived from coffee production, comes from the dried-out husk of a fruity coffee cherry. When harvesting coffee, farmers pick coffee cherries, little red fruits which are processed for the hard green bean inside. The beans are roasted into the coffee you buy at the store. The peeled “cherries” usually get discarded. Unless they're sent to me.
I came across coffee cherry tea while researching coffee alternatives for our coffee package. But though it's technically a coffee alternative, the berry-flavored tea had no place alongside the powdery barley-or-chicory-based coffee alternatives in the story.
So—in keeping with our #WasteLess policy here at Epicurious—I put the tea to work. I steeped the dried coffee cherries from Verve Roasters in a hot water infusion, which got more syrupy and potent the longer it steeped. I stirred in a little agave nectar to make a syrup. Then I started adding things: everything from bracing vodka and lemon to full-bodied (and domineering) pomegranate juice.
The cocktail we settled on uses just a little bit of pomegranate as the cocktail’s “seasoning,” letting the coffee-cherry syrup, tequila, and puckery ginger beer shine.
The only thing left to do was name it. Luckily, our executive director, Eric Gillin, loves playing punk rock in the office at all times, which gave me the idea to nod to Hüsker Dü, one of the genre’s most influential bands.
Tea time never felt so rocking.
