North Star's Director and Co-Founder, Hols discusses her recommendations for coffee consumption while being pregnant.
What was the advice you received from medical professionals about drinking caffeine while pregnant?
It can be tough to figure out if I am being honest. The current NHS guidelines recommend that pregnant women should have less than 200mg a day and say that this is about 2 cups of instant coffee. How this relates to a cup of filter/an espresso based drink is really difficult to calculate as it depends on dosage/species of coffee etc. Many women just opt to cut it out all together as you can't forget that foods such as chocolate (a pregnancy essential) also contain caffeine.
How did you get your coffee fix during pregnancy?
Having worked in coffee for over 10 years, people always assume I must get through quite a lot in a day. The truth is that I don't drink coffee for the caffeine (unless it is the depths of winter and I am seriously sleep deprived) I drink it purely for the enjoyment of the flavour and sensory experience. Therefore, it isn't unusual for me to have one coffee a day particularly when I have to taste/cup a table full of production roasts. I was careful to use my spittoon more in this instance and ensure that the one cup of coffee I did have per day was just a really good one. Having said that, I also enjoyed discovering how nice the North Star decaf actually is. I always knew it was good in comparison to commercial decaf coffees but never had a need to drink it myself.
As someone with all the gadgets and gismos, what was your go-to coffee set up once the baby arrived and why?
It is pretty essential to make a decent amount of coffee consistently well and very quickly. For this reason, I relied heavily on my Wilfa grinder and Moccamaster batch brew so that I could make a litre of great coffee in 5 minutes or so. The advantage of the Moccamaster is that it brews the coffee into a thermos jug to keep it hot for a few hours too.
Discover our 'new parent' recommendations:
1 x Moccamaster Coffee Maker
1 x Wilfa Smart Coffee Grinder
2 x notNeutral LINO 10oz Coffee Mug
If you want to avoid caffeine altogether then try our delicious single origin CO2 Decaf.
