Cold Brew at Home: The Ratio, the Routine, and the Right Glass

Cold brew at home costs a fraction of the café version and takes five minutes of actual work. The formula: 1 cup coarse-ground coffee per 4 cups cold water, steeped 12–18 hours, then filtered. That makes a concentrate you cut 1:1 with water or milk over ice. Here's the glass-based system that makes it a routine instead of a project.

The brew vessel

A 1 gallon wide-mouth jar is the ideal brewer: room for 3 cups of grounds and 12 cups of water (a week of concentrate), a mouth wide enough to stir and clean, and glass that never holds yesterday's coffee oils the way plastic pitchers do. Steep on the counter or in the fridge — fridge steeping runs slower, so push toward 18 hours.

Filtering without the mess

Strain through a fine mesh into a second vessel; a stainless mesh filter catches the grounds, and a second pass through a paper filter polishes off the fine sediment if you like it crystal clear.

Storage: this is where glass earns it

Concentrate keeps up to 2 weeks refrigerated in airtight glass. Decant into 32 oz growlers (the funnel set keeps pouring clean) — one quart per bottle, grab-and-go all week — or a 64 oz milk jug with handle for one-handed fridge pouring. A 12 oz square bottle of homemade vanilla-syrup creamer next to it completes the station.

Serving a crowd

Brunch or office duty: dilute the concentrate into a 1 gallon glass dispenser and let people pour their own over ice — add a drip tray under the spigot and the table stays clean.

The whole setup — brewer, bottles, dispenser — lives across our jars, milk bottles, and dispensers. Free US shipping over $20, glass-safe packaging from New Jersey.