Classic Cold Brew Concentrate (1:5)

This is the batch we brew every week and the base for every recipe on the site. It's a 1:5 concentrate: strong enough to survive milk and ice, flexible enough to be five different drinks. If you want the reasoning behind every number, it's in the ratio guide; if you want a different batch size, the calculator will re-do the math for you.

Ingredients

• 200 g coffee, coarsely ground (sea-salt texture) — a medium or medium-dark roast is the reliable choice; see choosing beans
• 1,000 g (1,000 ml) cold, filtered water

Yield: roughly 600–650 ml of concentrate (the grounds keep the rest — this is normal). That's 8–10 finished drinks once diluted.

Method

1. Weigh the ground coffee into a large jar or pitcher.
2. Pour in the water. Stir for a full 30 seconds — every ground wet, no dry pockets.
3. Cover. Steep 16 hours at room temperature (14 if your kitchen runs warm, up to 24 in the fridge).
4. Strain through a fine-mesh sieve into a clean vessel. Don't press the grounds; pressing extracts bitterness and clouds the cup.
5. Strain again through a paper filter. Slower, worth it.
6. Bottle, seal, refrigerate. Best inside 7 days; honest for 10.

The dilution chart

Concentrate is a starting point, not a drink. Standard cuts, per glass:

Drink	Build
Black, over ice	120 ml concentrate + 120 ml cold water, big cube
Iced latte	120 ml concentrate + 150 ml milk of choice
Hot, americano-style	120 ml concentrate + 180 ml just-boiled water
Sweet cream float	Build the vanilla sweet cream version
Evening use	See the Cold Brew Old Fashioned

Notes from repetition

• The stir matters more than the beans. An un-stirred batch channels water past dry clumps and under-extracts no matter what you paid per bag.
• Big ice or no ice. One large cube dilutes slowly; a handful of hotel ice turns your work into coffee-flavored water in eight minutes.
• Label the bottle with the strain date. Day-9 concentrate looks identical to day-2 concentrate. It does not taste identical.