Hawaiian kava (ʻawa): the sacred root of Hawaiʻi

A taste of 'awa side story

A couple years ago I handed a bowl full of coconut cups, a batching bag, and a ziplocked pound of our latest batch of puariki to a group of uncles at a family friend gathering. One I hadn't seen in well over a decade laughed and let me know I'd 'had da good stuff' before.

It turns out sometime in junior high, after my brother and I had spent the whole morning 3-pronging and picking opihi for a get together. Uncle called us over to the 'old mans table' to drink with the other older guys. He didn't really explain anything and I was often told to kulikuli (shut up) cause I was known over the years as the little one who asked too many questions. I actually had an uncle tell me once if I asked too much it would anger the spirits and I would shishi/wet the bed. He said the same thing when I was playing with sticks in the fire for too long. My gullible ass believed him for longer than I'd like to admit.

He shook up a mixed jug which I thought was alcohol, poured something and passed it to my brother and I, congratulating us for contributing some prized catches to the feast. I watched my brother, who is a few years older, drink it and made a weird face after taking it in a couple big sips. I remember wanting to gain some respect, since I had already made an idiot of myself earlier on something completely unrelated, so I threw it back in one shot and almost puked it back up in my mouth. For the longest time I actually thought it was noni juice.

I don't remember much of the experience but I did remember feeling very off, which I thought was cause of diving all day and only eating a few balls of rice with some opihi on the beach, but it's all starting to make sense now. Some uncles are men of very few words. Prideful, but stern and heavy on traditional respect. I wish I knew how to pry more information out of him like: where the heck did he get this, what varietal, and so on. But even though its decades later, to him I'm still the little kid with the loose tongue. Maybe one day I'll find out about this mystery root. One day.

Anyways, ʻawa is the Hawaiian name for kava, and in Hawaiʻi it was a sacred plant long before anyone thought to sell it. So I want to walk through what it is, the varieties worth knowing, why not many Hawaiians even know it exits, and the excitement about the future of 'awa.

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What is Hawaiian ʻawa?

Hawaiian kava is called ʻawa, and it's a noble plant tied deeply to historical Hawaiian ceremony, medicinal healing, spiritual practices, relationships, and daily life. It belongs to two of the major principal Gods in Hawaiian mythology. Kāne, who is the god of freshwater, sunlight, forests, and life itself. And to Kanaloa, who represents the deep ocean, long distance voyaging (much on that later), healing, and deep subconscious.

This idea of belonging and ownership is important because it tells you what ʻawa was actually for. The aliʻi and the kāhuna drank it in moments that mattered outside of the day to day relaxing we often see kava used as. It was poured to honor the akua and was commonly offered before asking the land or the ancestors for anything. I went deeper on the Hawaiian relationship to the natural world in our ʻĀina is life piece if you want the fuller picture.

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A cup as a doorway

In Christianity and Catholicism, there is a practice of the holy Eucharist, which holds deep symbolic weight in the religion. In the bible during the last supper Jesus had with his disciplines, he took a glass of wine and broke bread as representations of his blood and body. In catholicism the priests consecration of the sacrament, is believed to literally turn it into the body and blood of Christ. Taking part in this ancient ritual is said to be the highest point in christian life.

A scholar in ancient elusian mysteries, Muraresku spent years chasing a similar single thread of sacred rituals through the ancient Mediterranean, only to find that the holiest rites of the Greek world at Elusius, also ran on a sacred drink. A drink that people traveled their whole lives to taste just once.

The more I sat with the ʻawa, and even outside of times of intentional reflection or exploration, the more I started to realize that this same human instinct showing up on the other side of the planet, completely independent, existed at the center of their most serious moments too.

I sound like a broken record here but I want to stress, this is not a drink that is to be taken lightly. The cup was literally seen as the doorway to connecting our realms of life, death, and beyond

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Kanaloa, the deep, and the canoe

Remember I said ʻawa belongs to two gods, and that I would come back to Kanaloa. Well let's dive into it.

If Kāne is the freshwater and the sunlight and the green growing world, the seen, then Kanaloa is his opposite and his partner. The saltwater, the deep ocean, the unseen, the healer, the long voyage and also the deep unconscious. He is the god you call on when you leave the safety of the land and point a canoe at open water with no sight of where you are going. And ʻawa belonged to him as much as to Kāne, which basically tells you the Hawaiians filed this plant under the same heading as the deep ocean and the deep self. The places you cannot see the bottom of, which is why i personally believe it's one of the best nootropics for meditative practices.

And I'm not trying to be poetic by any stretch of the imagination, this is how they actually used it. ʻAwa was the drink for crossing thresholds, for the moments you had to go inward or downward or out past the reef into the unknown, the same register as the deep subconscious. A navigator's drink as much as a priest's.

And here is the part that ties the whole story of Hawaiian ʻawa together, because Kanaloa's art of sailing nearly died and then came roaring back, exactly like the root did. For centuries Hawaiians and all Polynesians crossed thousands of miles of open Pacific with no compass and no charts, reading the stars and the swells and the birds and the wind, a body of knowledge so precise it let them find specks of island in an ocean that is mostly emptiness. In the Disney movie moana they called it Wayfinding. Colonization nearly erased it. By the middle of the twentieth century almost nobody left in Hawaiʻi could still navigate the old way. Kind of like how Moana had to rediscover this wisdom in the movie.

So in 1976 a group called the Polynesian Voyaging Society built a traditional double-hulled canoe named Hōkūleʻa and set out to sail it from Hawaiʻi to Tahiti the ancient way, no instruments at all. The catch was that the knowledge was already gone from Hawaiʻi, so they had to bring in a master navigator named Mau Piailug from the tiny island of Satawal in Micronesia, one of the last men alive who still carried it, a man who chose to hand over closely guarded knowledge rather than let it die with him. Mau read the ocean the whole way and brought the canoe to Tahiti, and when it landed more than seventeen thousand people were waiting on the beach. That single voyage is widely credited with sparking the Hawaiian Renaissance, the revival of language and hula and navigation and identity that Hawaiians are still building on today.

I bring it up right here because it is the same exact shape as the ʻawa story. A deep, sacred Hawaiian knowledge, nearly stamped out, kept alive by a handful of stubborn people, and then deliberately brought back. Kanaloa's canoe and Kāne's root are reviving on the same trajectory.

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More than a buzz: ʻawa as medicine and ceremony

It is worth saying plainly that for most of Hawaiian history ʻawa was not an evening relaxer, it was a tool, and a serious one. In lāʻau lapaʻau, the Hawaiian system of plant medicine, the kāhuna reached for ʻawa across a long list of uses, to ease a restless body toward sleep, to quiet pain, to calm the mind, to help with the chills and aches that ride in with sickness, and as part of cleansing and spiritual work.

The ʻawa ceremony was also important as it was prepared with care and shared from the ʻapu, the polished coconut-shell cup, in a set order that honored rank and the gods, and the first of it was often offered to the akua before a single person drank. You did not slam it. You acknowledged it, you offered it, and then you received it. The cup was treated as a guest, almost like a living entity. I try to keep a little of that in mind even now, mixing instant kava in a shaker on a Tuesday night.

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The ʻawa varieties worth knowing

There are around 13 noble ʻawa lines that survived, each one historically grown for its own use, some for the kāhuna and the serious ceremonies, some for the everyday, and the thing they almost all share is a chemotype heavy in 4 and 6, kavain and dihydromethysticin, the kavalactones behind that clean, calming, slightly euphoric headiness, usually sitting up at a high 10 to 15 percent kavalactones. Here are the ones worth knowing.

• Hiwa, the sacred one. The name means favorite, and it was reserved for the kāhuna and the royalty, the ʻawa poured for the serious ceremonies and the ritual and medicinal work, not the after-work cup. Chemotype 462351, around 13–15% kavalactones.
• Moʻi, the royal one. Short, dark, purple, smooth and almost buttery with a note of chocolate, tied to the high chiefs and offered to the gods alongside a black pig. People describe it as lifting and mellowing at the same time, which is a rare combination. Chemotype 463251, around 12–14%.
• Mahakea, one of the more potent everyday varieties, green-stalked with purple internodes, a sun-lover that wants the heat, common in both ceremony and social drinking. Chemotype 461235, a strong 15–17%.
• Nene, the gentle one, and the name itself is a soft word spoken to soothe Hawaiian children, which kind of tells you the character before you ever taste it. Chemotype 463521, a milder 10–12%.
• Hanakapiʻai, named for the valley on Kauaʻi, unique-looking and strong, and one of the most-loved ʻawa among the people who actually drink it daily in Hawaiʻi. Chemotype 423651, a big 15–17%.
• Papa Kea, probably the strongest of all the Hawaiian ʻawa, the one you respect from the very first cup, sitting up around 18–20% kavalactones. Chemotype 462351. Not where a first-timer should start.
• Papaʻeleʻele, a robust grower with a high kavalactone load, 16–18%, dark and serious. Chemotype 462351. There's also a sister line, Papaʻeleʻele Puʻupuʻu, a little different in look and still strong at 13–15%.
• ʻOpihikao, a tall, spotted variety that's gone very rare, and the people who have it talk about a harmonious blend of relaxation and mild euphoria, more of a balanced cup than a knockout. Chemotype 462531, around 10–12%.
• Panaʻewa and Honokane Iki, two of the dependable ceremonial-grade lines, both landing around 13–15%, both named for places that carry their own stories. Chemotypes in the 463251 family.
• Kumakua, quieter and less famous but still woven into the old cultural practices, a gentler 10–12%. Chemotype 462351.
• Mapulehu, the mildest of the bunch at 6–8%, leaned on historically more for its medicinal and ceremonial use than for raw strength. Chemotype 462531.

So that's a lot of names, I know, but the short version is this, Hawaiian ʻawa runs all the way from the gentle, children's-name-soft Nene up to Papa Kea that'll genuinely put you down, and almost every line is high-kavalactone, chemotype 4-and-6, the good clean calm. These lines are kept alive across the islands by farmers and practitioners who treat the work as kuleana, not just agriculture.

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Why real Hawaiian ʻawa is so rare

Awa used to be grown island wide for centuries and used for religious, business, and community activities. But during the Christianization of the Hawaiian Kingdom in the early 1800's (long before the annexation of the Hawaiian government), 'awa use was actively suppressed as Protestant missionaries understood how the sacred root helped sustain an entire spiritual and social system, one that competed directly with Christian authority.

When King Kamehameha II and Queen Ka'ahumanu formally broke the kapu system in 1819, before the Kingdom could work to create a new system of its own, Christian missionaries immediately swooped in to implement their moral teachings as part of formal Hawaiian Law. Because of this, in 1820 'Awa became officially illegal for personal cultivation and later on was restricted only for authorized medicinal use with a licensed kahuna or physician. Growing of 'awa then became restricted to only one licensed field per each of the major four islands, and unauthorized cultivation or use carried heavy fines. Imported Western alcohol increasingly became the commercial commodity and many argue the mass introduction of this superdrug was the start of the degredation of hawaiian values, tribal community, the nuclear family, as well as a vast increase in criminal activity.

Awa has only now within the last 10 years been seeing a resurgance and native islanders have been slowly stepping deeper into their roots to uncover what really happened. The problem now is awa does take a long time to grow before harvest, and thanks to the annexation and incoming swarths of wealthy americans puchasing government lands, most native islanders no longer have acces to any areas to justify it's cultivation.

The honest economics are simple. ʻAwa grows slowly, the yields are small, the land and labor in Hawaiʻi cost what they cost now, and most of what's grown stays in the islands for local drinking and ceremony, which some amy argue is the way it should. We hope this changes though. We hope many more farmers become interested in their roots and begin cultivating kava, but only time will tell. So this is why very little real Hawaiian ʻawa is grown, why it rarely ever leaves, and why what does is expensive. And that my friends is why Hawaiian ʻawa is often brought up with a more careful reverence than the rest of the Pacific imports.

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Where to start

Unfortunately while we are still cultivating a few varietals of Hawaiian 'awa on Oahu and Kona, we do not have plans to release them to the public again until late 2027.

But as you guys know, if we can't make the best, we will refer you to the ones we believe who do. We have some friends who are actively growing these rare varietals and highly recommend checking them out. A leader in the Hawaiian 'awa community, Ed Johnston over at Pu'u O Hoku Ranch on Molokai, grows a number of varietals and regularly has very high quality frozen 'awa available depending on what was pulled. You can find them Pu'u O Hoku. We also recommend checking out Pū'iwa Farms started by the late and great Mike Munsell, A legend in the kava community and one of the best of us who was taken way too soon. You can find out about them at Pū'iwa Farms.

Again, I'm not the all-knowing kava elder as I'm obviously still figuring out what this plant has to teach me. All statements here are my opinions and are not medical advice.

New to kava? Our First Timer's Guide to Kava will walk you in.

From our ohana to yours, mahalo nui 🤙.