Iced Coffee at Home: Cold-Brew Coffee Makers vs. DIY

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As the summer months approach, there’s nothing that hits the spot like iced coffee. But buying it from your local cold-brew purveyor each morning can get expensive. After years of testing dozens of methods (DIY and otherwise), we’ve found that the best way to regularly get iced coffee is to use a cold-brew coffee maker.

There’s nothing complicated about making cold brew—you just put coarsely ground coffee into water, wait, and then strain out the grounds. But having a cold-brew coffee maker allows you to achieve caffeination with little fuss. Each DIY method we’ve tried often requires some cumbersome setup to pull off and produces coffee with flawed flavor or grit.

In this video, we walk you through different cold-brew processes and compare some popular no-frills methods with our favorite off-the-shelf kits, the OXO Cold Brew Coffee Maker and the Filtron.