Yes, you can make delicious cold brew that tastes like a barista made it in a coffee shop — and the best part is that cold brew is more simple than it may seem! No matter your recipe, there are a few rules. First, use filtered water, it will make your coffee taste delicious. Second, grind your coffee coarse, think: the size of cracked pepper. Don’t use boiling water, because it will change the taste of your cold brew. Lastly, don’t pour leftover coffee over ice, cold brew tastes better with fresh coffee.

Cold brew concentrate is the strong, condensed version of ready-to-drink cold brew. It is achieved by using a closer ratio of coffee to water. By controlling the recipe, you also control how much water you use with your coffee grounds and which flavor notes are pulled out. I generally like to use a 1:5 coffee to water ratio and play from there. You can fill our Cold Brew Bags with 3 oz of coffee to about 28 oz of water for a strong cold brew and dilute it using clean filtered water, cream, or sweet flavors like vanilla or caramel.

Nothing gold can stay, leftover coffee included. Luckily, with the soft extraction of cold brew, concentrate should last up to two weeks in your refrigerator with its most special flavor notes fading in about a week. If you dilute your cold brew concentrate with cold water, expect your cold brew to only last two to three days. Fortunately, there are a number of things you can do with cold brew before then, like iced lattes or cold brew popsicles!

Because the coffee grounds sit in contact with cold water or room temperature water for many hours, your coffee grounds should be coarse, like kosher salt. The larger the grind size, the smoother the cold brew will be. It’s easy to see that when you use a finer grind for your coffee grounds, you create a cloudy and muddy taste in your cold brew. To make it taste clean and delicious, make sure you’re using coffee ground nice and coarse.