Wednesday, September 3, 2008

Regular or Decaf?

So it's impossible to get "green" coffee in Canada. There are no local growers, due to climate, beans have to travel great distances to reach us. Since I love coffee and can't live without it, I do the best I can. I buy fair trade, locally roasted beans. My roastery is the Coffee Tree in Bloor West Village. 

I have another coffee issue though. When I found out I was pregnant I switched to decaf. Best thing for the baby right? Last week someone pointed out that beans have to go through some kind of process to get the caffeine out (duh). Seriously, it hadn't occurred to me. I decided to look it up. There are actually 4 processes and 2 methods for "decaffeinating" beans. Check out Wikipedia if you want to know more about them. 

I usually buy Swiss Water Decaf - although I had no clue what it meant. While it's a chemically free process, it does waste water and beans in the process. So, to decaf or not to decaf? Recently some beans have been discovered that contain lower amounts of caffeine naturally. It'll be neat to see if they become more widely available. 

I may go back to caffeine, see how the baby takes it, possibly cut to half a cup a day. 

ps. it's easy to decaffeinate your tea. Just pour off the first infusion, use the same leaves and pour the cup again. Most of the caffeine will pour off in the first cup.

3 comments:

  1. Caffeine is not bad for the baby, 1 coffee a day is fine for you and your munchkin :)

    When my baby was in NICU for 2 months, they fortified my breast milk with caffeine to help my baby's heart and blood circulation, they also said that I can still have 1 small coffee a day :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. that's amazing. a natural drug. i've noticed that she's been just fine with caffeine and the odd glass of wine

    ReplyDelete
  3. Coffee has been getting a pretty bad rep but it's all nonsense, so is wine while breastfeeding, there is nothing wrong with the odd glass of wine, I'm starting to believe that we live in extremely paranoid times :)

    ReplyDelete