Food
Cold brew at home, costed per litre
The equipment barely matters. The grind, the ratio and the bean price decide what a litre costs and how it tastes.
By Ravi Deshpande1 min read5,310 readers5 Sept 2026
A café charges between ₹250 and ₹350 for a cold brew. Made at home with the same beans it costs about ₹48 a serving, and most of that is the coffee.
The ratio that works
One part coffee to five parts water by weight, steeped sixteen hours at room temperature, produces a concentrate you dilute one to one. Going stronger does not extract more, it just wastes grounds.
Grind matters more than gear
Coarse, and consistent. A blade grinder produces a mixture of powder and boulders, the powder over-extracts into bitterness while the boulders contribute nothing. This is the single biggest variable in the whole process, and it is a grinder problem, not a brewer problem.
What the equipment actually does
A dedicated cold brew vessel filters slightly more cleanly than a jar and a cloth. That is the entire difference. If you already own a jar, you own a cold brew maker.
Working out your own cost
Take the price per kilo of your beans, divide by five to get the coffee cost of a litre of concentrate, then halve it for the diluted litre. Everything else — water, electricity, the jar amortised over a year — rounds to nothing.
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