A specialty coffee cellar that learns your palate.
Specialty coffee discovery is broken.
Cascara fixes that.
Gil Erez
Founder & CEO
Gil has spent 15 years across Europe and Asia building SaaS fintech platforms and the teams behind them. Most recently Chief Strategy Officer at Silver Lining, overseeing company operations and Silver Lining Capital, a small-business loan fund.
Here’s the theory: specialty coffee discovery is broken, palate is learnable, and the Philippines is the right place to build the proof. Gil brings the operating discipline of a bootstrapped SaaS company, the capital-allocation instincts of a fund manager, and a handful of years of specialty-coffee practice at home — which is exactly why he needed Cascara. He wanted to sharpen his palate, but couldn’t say much more than “I like it” or “I don’t.” He knew he wasn’t alone. Cascara is both the question and the answer, with good coffee on the table while everyone works it out.
Newer to specialty? Read our guide to specialty coffee in the Philippines.
A specialty coffee cellar with a palate-intelligence algorithm.
Cascara is a Philippine specialty coffee company building two things in parallel. The first is a free web platform that learns what your mouth wants from coffee — eleven questions, less than a minute, then a Cellar Identity that gets sharper every time you log a brew. The second is the cellar itself: the Drop — one-time bags of palate-matched coffee, live now — and the Subscription, a recurring monthly bag matched to your palate by an algorithm rather than picked by a curator-of-the-month.
We organize every coffee in the cellar against a four-corner framework called the Process Spectrum — Clean, Classic, Fluid, and Experimental — that captures how a coffee actually tastes more reliably than country, altitude, or varietal alone. The framework is built around processing, the biggest variable in how a cup tastes after terroir, and it’s what makes the palate model possible: once we know which corner your palate lives in, we can shortlist from every bean in the catalog — Philippine and international roasters alike — in seconds.
For drinkers in Manila, the web app is a discovery tool — a curator-verified directory of specialty coffee roasters across Metro Manila, filterable by the palate corner each one tends toward. For drinkers across the Philippines, the directory extends to Baguio, Cebu, Davao, Cagayan de Oro, and beyond — see the full guide to specialty coffee in the Philippines. For people who want one good bag a month, calibrating now means the Subscription starts matched to your palate from the first bag.
The whole system runs on tasting notes — but we don’t expect you to bring vocabulary to it. Most of the eleven calibration questions are about preferences you already have in wine, chocolate, fruit, and savory food, and the model translates those into coffee-specific palate axes. If you want to learn how tasting notes actually work, the guide is there. If you don’t, take the quiz and let the model do the work.
Cascara is independent and Philippine-built. The full editorial guide library is free to read.