A quick primer on castor castor is the word for the dried outside of the coffee fruit.

It's pretty much mostly skin on a little bit of fruit flesh, but there's not much fruit.

Flesh in coffee is, in fact, the first thing I ever made a video about on the Internet for coffee.

It was my very first video cast kind of thing.

I tried to explain what it was and how to make it, and that was a lot of fun.

You can brew.

It is tea.

It's pretty delicious.

There's varying opinions on how much caffeine it contains.

The people believe a lot of caffeine.

Some people believe it doesn't contain as much.

It's been all over Twitter that it's banned in the UK People are getting raided on.

I wanted to shed a little light on the situation and explain how we got to where we are now.

So Backstory 2008 through Right about You.

We're very excited.

We've never tasted this before.

Anything like it before.

Now, at the time we made a phone call to inquire about the legality of it.

The person had no idea what I was talking about, and despite me trying to explain that it was the skin of the fruit they were like.

But it's coffee, right?

And well, yes, it's coffee that like, Well, it's fine to sell coffee.

This gets more confusing because of the wording around the import legislation around coffee, and they talk about it being a coffee, whether roasted or not, or decaffeinated or not, coffee husks and skins and coffee substitutes containing coffee in any form, right?

Like so, husks and skins are already covered in some ways with the import of coffee.

Now I suspect that legislation is there mostly so you can import really low grades of coffee with no real trouble.

Lot of instant coffee gets made in the U.

K.

They're gonna be bringing in some pretty, pretty poor, quality green coffee on finding whole dried Cherries now and again in your green coffee at that grade is not unusual, But that's kind of different, it seems, from drinking the dried fruit from the outside of the coffee cherry, which is what we're talking about today.

It's been something I've been very passionate about because it seems kind of insane to me that we have a bunch of fruit farmers growing coffee who never really get to sell the fruit on.

I always felt that if we could find an avenue or use for that fruit, then that would add additional incomes to farms.

Now Casca has been popular, but really, it's a tiny, tiny, tiny drop in the bucket on the stuff that I've done would say, making casket chocolate or the stuff we've done it square Mom, we made Casca tonic or we made Casquero Gummies or that kind of stuff was about trying to find the use again.

There are products like Castor a flower out there, but they've never really taken hold.

So where do things go wrong?

Well, in 2016 I got a message from Class Thompson of the Coffee Collective in Copenhagen, and he told me that they had run into some issues because the Danish authorities have decided Casquero was not legal and they could no longer sell it.

They'd looked into getting approval on.

It was really, really, really expensive, and he got in touch with me to talk about that.

Back in July 2016 we put out something on Twitter asking for roasters around Europe with seven Castro to get in touch because we understood that at this point we would probably have to make what was called a novel food application.

So we began work on this and then very soon afterwards will put in touch with Joel Panama varietals.

Now Joel was already a long, long, long way down the track of putting together a novel through application.

And in fact, we think that it's his application going in and being submitted.

That's triggered this interest from the authorities in the UK Certainly when it comes to Castor, what happened there was that out of the blue, we had a couple of people visiting coffee, arresting companies in cafes, removing castor and tagging that they could no longer sell it, that it is not a novel food, that it's not classified as being legal for sale.

So Casca is not illegal.

It's just not legal yet, but we hope it will be illegal.

Now.

Getting this stuff done is expensive on.

Just because we're in the you for now doesn't mean Joel successful application will automatically trigger it being legal tohave Casca or sell Casper in the UK or anywhere else in Europe.

In many cases, many different countries will have to submit applications a number of people working on this, but it's gonna take some time.

And so for now, Casca is gonna disappear from the UK.

I think it's likely to disappear from a few other European countries in the short term to I don't know about time frames yet.

These things are bureaucratic and they take time in some way.

If you're a cafe watching this and you're stalking Castro, you should really take it off the shelves.

If you're a roaster stocking Casper for now, you should be delisted from your sight.

You can't serve it.

You can't use it.

You can't sell it.

We hope to change that in the very near future.

It is a frustrating situation, but that is what it is.