Vanuatu Kava: The Homeland, the Gods, and the Cultivars

Vanuatu is said to be the birthplace of kava. It is both the first proliferation of its roots and the culture that has drunk it the longest. In this post we will cover the mythology, the hundred years it spent banned, the revival, the cultivars worth knowing, and how to find the one that's best for you.

Most of what we make starts its life as Vanuatu noble kava, so I'm not exactly a neutral party here, but the reason isn't completely loyalty. When you spend enough years drinking across origins, you eventually keep coming back to Vanuatu for the same reason people keep coming back to certain wine regions: the range is just deeper, the tradition is unbroken, and the floor on quality is so high that the country actually protects it by law.

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What makes Vanuatu kava special?

The first reason Vanuatu's kava is special is because kava as a whole was literally born in Vanuatu. The plant was first domesticated in the northern islands thousands of years ago. The thing that still blows my mind is the fact that it's seedless. Kava cannot reproduce on its own. There is no way to self-propagate, which means every single kava plant alive today exists only because a human took a cutting and planted it by hand, generation after generation for something like three thousand years straight. They call it a canoe plant, which means it traveled from island to island, so from Vanuatu it rode out in the canoes of Austronesian voyagers and spread across the whole Pacific by hand.

Michael Pollan has this idea in The Botany of Desire that we like to think we domesticated plants, but the truth could actually be that a handful of plants domesticated us. They figured out, in an evolutionary sense, that being useful or beautiful or intoxicating to humans was a fantastic survival strategy, and so the apple and the tulip and cannabis basically hired us to spread them around the planet. Kava is a pure example of that whole idea because it literally cannot survive without us. It made itself so valuable to people that we've carried it across thousands of miles of open ocean for three millennia just to keep it alive. The plant and the people coevolved. I've seen kava as far as Korea, Vietnam, Russia, and Norway, from Alaska all the way south to Argentina.

The second thing is the law. Vanuatu sorts its cultivars into noble, medicinal, tudei ("two-day"), and wichmannii, and only noble cultivars are legal to be exported, although sometimes things do get through the cracks. Noble kava has a long record of safe daily use and a balanced kavalactone profile. Tudei and wichmannii are much rougher experiences and can linger into the next day, which is exactly why they're kept off the export market.

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The plant of the gods

In Vanuatu, kava was never just the thing you drank to take the edge off after a long day. It sat at the center of the whole spiritual world. The plant was tied to the ancestors, the spirits the old understanding says live both around us and inside us, and the most potent kava was treated as a kind of passkey. Drunk properly, in the quiet, at dusk, the mild altered state it brought was how a man could go still enough to actually hear the ancestors talking. That's why some cultivars were handled with real care and weren't poured for just anyone. They were a channel, a way to communicate with our past.

You can see allusions to this in current psychological research on altered states of consciousness. Researchers use substances including ketamine, psilocybin, MDMA, LSD, and ibogaine to explore memories and archetypes that affect day-to-day reality. The reason you yell at your child may not be because they did something wrong; it may be an automated response learned from your parents when you did the same thing. Current research uses altered states to help individuals communicate with a higher or deeper realm. The islanders understood the value of such states thousands of years ago.

The idea that these archetypes still exist is also central to Internal Family Systems, or IFS, which explores the different parts within a person and how they shape present behavior.

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Where kava comes from, and the story they tell about it

Now I want to slow down on the origin myth in order to ensure we get this right, because the stories shift island to island the way oral tradition always does. But in northern Vanuatu, where the plant was most likely first domesticated, the throughline keeps landing on the same hard image: a body in the ground, and kava growing up out of it.

One version, as it's told around Efate, goes like this. Two brothers, Ben, a farmer, and Cassie, a fisherman. Ben was out working his crops in the forest before sunrise most days, while Cassie came and went with the tides and was around the village more than a man probably should be. One day Ben came home and found Cassie in his bed with his wife, and in a single fit of rage he killed them both, his wife and his own brother, and buried them in the earth behind his hut. Then he fell into a depression so heavy he couldn't stand the daylight and couldn't sleep. Until one of those long sleepless nights, a plant with heart-shaped leaves came to him in a dream and told him to go dig where he'd buried his wife. The next morning he went out, and there it was already sprouting from her grave, the branches pushing up with internodes he saw as brown knuckles of her hands, green-veined heart-shaped leaves coming off them. And the most important part is what he found at the end: being near the plant settled him and he was able to start sleeping again.

It was like the weight lifted just enough to keep living. Probably one of the most beautiful definitions of what kava is.

There are two separate things running underneath that story, and both are worth exploring.

The first is biological, and it's almost too on the nose. Remember that kava is seedless. It cannot make a seed, so the only way to grow a new kava plant is to cut a piece off a living one, a piece of its actual body, and push that cutting into the ground until it roots and grows. Which means every kava plant that has ever existed literally grew up out of a buried piece of another plant's body. Now read the myth back with that in mind. A plant that grows out of a buried body. The story is describing, almost step for step, the way kava actually reproduces. These people had no way to write it down as botany, so they wrote it down as a myth, and the myth carried the real fact, that this thing comes from a buried body and from death and never from a seed, perfectly intact across a thousand years of retelling. The myth is the biology. It's just told as a story.

The second is archetypal. The skeleton of that myth, betrayal, murder, a body put in the ground, and out of the buried body a plant that brings life and peace, is not unique to Vanuatu. It is much older than Vanuatu. It is Osiris, killed by his own brother Set, his body scattered into the earth, and from that death the grain rises, Osiris becoming god of vegetation and the afterlife in the same breath. It's the seed that has to fall and die before it bears anything, the line that runs right through into the Bible as well. It's the same archetypal story, but Vanuatu did not borrow this from anyone. The point is the exact opposite. The same deep story keeps surfacing on its own wherever humans sit down and try to make sense of the worst thing that can happen to them, which is the suspicion that suffering and death are somehow the soil the good things grow out of. Vanuatu just happened to find it sitting in a real plant that genuinely grows from a grave.

Tonga has its own version of this story just sitting right across the water. In the Tongan telling, a poor couple named Fevanga and Fefafa were visited by the Tuʻi Tonga, the great king, and they had nothing fit to feed him. Their one crop was a single kape plant, a giant taro. But their leprous daughter, a girl named Kavaʻonau, had leaned against it and made it kapu, forbidden to serve. So with nothing left to offer and everything to lose by shaming the king, they killed their own daughter and prepared her for him. The king understood what they had done, refused to eat her, and ordered her buried with honor. And out of her grave two plants grew. From her head came kava, bitter. From her feet came sugarcane, sweet, the very thing Tongans still chew to chase the bitterness of the cup. Same bones as the Vanuatu story. A loved body in the ground, grief and guilt and sacrifice, and a plant rising straight up out of the death to bring people back together. I'll tell that one properly in the Tongan guide, but it's worth seeing how these island chains have been passing the same buried-body story back and forth across the water for who knows how long, each of them carving it a little differently.

There's a second, lighter kind of story too about discovery, where the effect of kava got noticed by watching an animal. A rat or a pig, depending on the island, was seen chewing the roots, then staggering around loose and content, sleeping it off and coming straight back for more the next day. Somebody watched that and figured they'd have what the animal was having. Half the great discoveries in history are really just a person paying close attention to an animal that got there first.

So that's death, and an animal. But there's one more unique origin story from down south on Tanna which is not about death at all, it's about sex. So I'm not going to tiptoe around it, but we're all adults here.

It opens with Mwatiktiki, which is Tanna's name for the same trickster demigod the rest of the Pacific calls Māui, the one who keeps fishing islands up out of the ocean and stealing fire and getting into exactly the kind of trouble that ends up creating the world. Mwatiktiki comes to Tanna carrying the first kava plant and hides it down in the rocks near the shore. Two women, ancestors of the Tanna people, come down to the water with their yams and crouch in the grass to peel them. One of them gets a surprise because the kava root has sprouted and risen up out of the ground and pushed itself up into her privates, and she feels a pleasure she's never felt before. She giggles with happiness and shares the secret with her sister. So the two of them dig the plant out from where Mwatiktiki stashed it, carry it home to their garden at Isouragi, and start to grow it and spread it around.

Even though the source is from a woman finding it, the reality of the actual use in the village by women was brutal. On Tanna, the taboo around women and kava grew so severe that a woman who so much as watched it being prepared could be put to death, and even today a woman doesn't order her own shell or step into the nakamal once the drinking has started. So the plant that a woman discovered, through her own body and her own pleasure, became the one thing she was most violently locked out of.

The nteresting thing here is the myth isn't recording history as much as it is also justifying an order. So you have to ask the obvious question. Why would the men take a plant a woman found, through her own pleasure, and then forbid women from it on pain of death? The reason the Tanna people themselves give, written down by the anthropologist Ron Brunton, who spent years living among them, comes down to shame. Because the plant first rose up out of a woman's body, out of her sexual organs. There is an old saying on the island that "only men can drink from a woman." So drinking kava is quietly understood as partaking of that, and to prepare it and drink it in the presence of the opposite sex carries the shame of what is symbolically happening. It means the origin and the taboo are not two separate facts. They are the same fact read two different ways.

And it's one of the oldest moves there is. The feminine discovers or originates the sacred thing, and the masculine ritualizes it, guards it, builds the rules and the walls around it. You can see the same shape in Dionysus and his maenads, in Demeter standing behind the mysteries at Eleusis. Women were originally the owners and the spiritual connectors here, and the "pluarchy," the rule of immature boys, wanted that power and did whatever it could to control it. Something in us keeps tying the sacred intoxicant to the feminine and then keeps trying to control the door.

And the other thread running under that is actually older than Tanna itself. It's old. It's ancient. It's the fact that human beings have always reached for intoxicants to lower the wall between two bodies, to explore each other and ourselves. Here is a culture that set that impulse right at the origin of its holiest drink, its sacrament, the discovery of the sacred and the discovery of pleasure landing in the same breath on the same plant. Kava melts the anxiety and the self-consciousness that stand between people. In both of these myths, the northern one and the southern one, the body is the first altar. Death on one island and sex on the other, Eros and Thanatos staring at each other across a few hundred miles of water, and both of them growing the exact same plant.

I went deeper on this whole way of seeing, a plant as kin, a place as ancestor, in our ʻĀina is life piece. Across thousands of miles of water, Pacific people keep independently arriving at the same place with kava: that it sits right on the line between the living and the dead, and that for those couple of hours of letting kava in, you can stand on that line.

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A hundred years in the dark, and the comeback

I actually was not aware of this until recently and was flabbergasted that this happened because it so closely aligned with what happened with ʻawa in Hawaiʻi. For roughly a hundred years, from around 1880 to 1980, kava drinking was actually suppressed across much of Vanuatu, and again, it was the missionaries who did it. The most potent kava was understood to possess sacred power and to allow communion with the gods, and a plant that opens a direct line to other gods is a direct competitor to the beliefs the missionaries brought. So Christian ni-Vanuatu chiefs, backed and legitimized by white missionaries, banned the old practices of kava, the ritual dancing, the customs, and pushed these sacred ways into the shadows for generations.

But thankfully it didn't die. And when the independence movement started building through the 1970s against the strange joint Anglo-French colonial rule, the people reached for kastom, customs, traditions, the old ways, as the rallying cry, the thing that made them distinctly ni-Vanuatu and not European.

Kava was right at the center of that.

So when Vanuatu won its independence in 1980, kava came roaring back as a symbol of national identity, and the number of urban nakamals in Port Vila exploded and has kept growing ever since. The thing the missionaries spent a century trying to bury turned out to be one of the deepest roots of the whole nation, and you can't pull a root that deep.

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A hundred languages, and a kava for every valley

Vanuatu is the most linguistically dense place on the entire planet. Not per square mile, per person. There are around 138 distinct indigenous languages still spoken across these islands, by a total population of under three hundred thousand people, which works out to roughly one whole language for every two thousand human beings. Nowhere else on earth even comes close except Papua New Guinea right next door.

And that is not a piece of trivia, it is the whole reason this country grows eighty-plus cultivars of kava. Picture what that level of language density actually means on the ground. Valleys a few miles apart, cut off from each other by mountains and water and reef, that could not easily understand one another and so each became its own small world, with its own words, its own customs, its own chiefs, and yes, its own kava, selected and bred and named in isolation for generations. Most countries are a culture. Vanuatu is a thousand of them stacked onto an island chain. And when a place is that fragmented, the plants fragment right along with it, so you end up with a different cultivar in nearly every bay.

The place all of it comes back together is the nakamal. A nakamal is the kava bar and the meeting house and the men's clubhouse all at once, and across Vanuatu it is where the day ends. As the sun drops, someone sounds a conch, the lights stay low or off, and people drift in, drink their shell in near silence, step outside to spit and let it settle, and sit with the quiet. Yes there is conversation, yes there is laughing, but you do not shout in a nakamal. You do not clink glasses and cheers after buying shots for the whole house. The whole etiquette is built around lowering the volume of the world, because the kava is doing something and you are meant to let it. After a hundred languages spend all day not quite understanding each other, the nakamal at dusk is the one place the whole island seems to finally agree on. The shell, the hush, and the dark.

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When Captain Cook met the chewed cup

There's a piece of Tanna's history worth slowing down on, because it's the moment the outside world first wrote kava down, and it did not go gently.

In August of 1774, Captain James Cook brought his second voyage down onto Tanna, this same volcanic island in the south that gave us the Mwatiktiki story, and anchored in a bay he named Port Resolution after his ship. It was not a calm visit. Mount Yasur, the volcano that still rumbles on Tanna today, was throwing fire and ash into the sky a few miles inland, close enough that the glow lit the clouds at night and ash drifted down on the deck. The Tannese met them armed and wary, and the whole two weeks ran on a knife's edge, to the point that one of Cook's men shot and killed a Tannese man during a tense moment on the beach over what seems to have been a misunderstanding, which angered Cook and which he could not undo. So that's the backdrop to picture. A nervous standoff under an erupting volcano.

And it was here, in the middle of all that, that Europeans got their first real look at how kava was made, and of course they were revolted by it. Cook had two naturalists aboard, Johann Reinhold Forster and his son Georg, and it's young Georg Forster who left one of the earliest written descriptions of the cup. The Tannese made their kava the oldest way there is, by mouth. Boys and young men took the root, chewed it down into a soft pulp, and spat the mash into a bowl, where it was mixed with water or coconut milk, kneaded, strained, and drunk. Forster wrote it up as about the most disgusting thing he had ever watched anyone prepare, the chewing and the spitting striking him and the rest of the crew as filthy and barbaric. Cook had already bumped into kava over in Tonga and Tahiti and had the same flinch. Eighteenth-century Englishmen could not get past the saliva.

But here's the part they had no way of knowing, even though it was so brilliant and it's the same point that runs through the Samoan story (also reinforcing the statement that our ancestors were not stupid). That chewing they were gagging at was actually the strongest way there is to make the cup, and the reason is more physical than you'd guess. For a long time people assumed saliva was doing some chemistry on the root, but Lebot is firm that this old idea was debunked more than a century ago. Kava's active compounds, the kavalactones, don't dissolve in water. They sit locked in a resin inside the root's cells, and the only way into your cup is to break the root into particles fine enough to release that resin and emulsify it, the way a drop of soap pulls oil into water. Chewing grinds the root far finer than any stone or grater can, so it frees and disperses more of the resin than pounding ever does. The saliva helps a little as an emulsifier, but it's the fineness of the chew doing the real work, not any enzyme. So the method Forster gagged at was simply pulling more out of the plant than the cleaner methods that later replaced it. The gross old way was the more effective way.

On Tanna it was very important who did the chewing. The job went to young boys, and there's a belief, written about by the people who've lived among the Tannese, that the chewers should be sexually innocent, untouched, for the kava to come out right. Which loops straight back to that origin story from earlier, the one where the plant first rose up out of a woman's body, out of her sex. If the plant carries that kind of charge at its very root, then the purity of the mouth that prepares it must run under the same logic, that this is a charged and sacred thing and the body that handles it has to be clean in that specific way.

There's a deeper reason the south does it this way, and Lebot lays it out best. Kava in Vanuatu actually has two different origins. In the north, where it was first domesticated, it's genuinely ancient and homegrown. But in the far south, on Tanna along with the small islands of Futuna, Aniwa, and Aneityum, the plant seems to have arrived much later and from the opposite direction, carried back in from Polynesia, from Samoa or Tonga, only some centuries ago. Tanna's own tradition lines up with that, telling of kava turning up alongside powerful magic and sorcery stones, the pig, and the political clan system, the whole bundle arriving together. That Polynesian round trip is what left its fingerprints on the south, the Polynesian-style name nikava and the Polynesian habit of chewing the root instead of pounding it. So the chewing you see on Tanna is really a Polynesian custom that sailed out east and circled back, rather than a holdover from kava's old northern Vanuatu homeland. Vincent Lebot, who wrote the book most serious kava people eventually end up reading, Kava: The Pacific Elixir, is the one who traces this. And it isn't only history. On Tanna they still make it this way today, young boys chewing the root at dusk and spitting the juice, the same scene that turned Cook's crew's stomachs two hundred and fifty years ago, still going on every evening.

So when you read the old explorers calling kava disgusting and barbaric, it's worth remembering they were watching the most potent and most carefully made version of the drink there is, and missing all of it. They thought they were watching boys spit into a bowl. They were actually watching one of the oldest surviving ways of making the plant of the gods.

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The cultivars worth knowing

Lebot's fieldwork put hard numbers on what makes Vanuatu the homeland and I cannot recommend his book enough. He recorded 247 named cultivars across the archipelago, which cluster into about 82 broad types, what botanists call 'morphotypes', the family groupings you land on once you realize a bunch of different local names are really the same plant. That is the deepest bench of kava anywhere on Earth, roughly 82 of the 118 distinct types known across the entire Pacific, all packed into one island chain. Every island has its own, so nobody has drunk them all, probably.

A Vanuatu cultivar is usually named for a physical feature, for a legend attached to it, or for the first person who developed the clone, so the names are little descriptions or little histories rather than catalog codes. And the diversity is not spread evenly. Two islands do most of the breeding, Pentecost in the north and Tanna in the south, and they sit on opposite sides of a deep cultural and biological divide that runs through the middle of the country. The split is sharp enough that a Pentecost farmer set down in a Tanna garden would not recognize the cultivars growing there, and the Tanna grower would be just as lost up north, even though both are tending the same species. A handful of cultivars, though, are the most prevalent in the wider kava world.

• Gorgor, the people's kava, originally from Pentecost and now probably the single most widely grown kava in the world. This is the house pour, the everyday standard in most nakamals, balanced and dependable and the one most folks first actually taste. Chemotype 423561.
• Melomelo, from Ambae, and it's named for exactly what it does, mellow. A warm, slow, balanced cultivar that leans to the heavier, body side without ever getting harsh, the one you reach for when you genuinely want to settle in and one of the longest lasting. Chemotype 245361.
• Palarasul, from the volcanic highlands of Espiritu Santo, smooth and creamy with a gentle uplift and a strength that sneaks up on you, rated by locals as one of the strongest in the country. Read the full Palarasul guide.
• Kelai, the champagne of kava, from Epi, quick and heady and euphoric and gone a little sooner than the heavy ones, the one for when you want the lift without the couch-lock. Chemotype 426135, the high-kavain profile Lebot singled out as famous throughout Vanuatu for its very pleasant effects. Read the full Kelai guide.
• Bir Kar, from Santo, named for its red stems, fast-acting and clear and heady with a clean finish and a flavor like roasted peanut and dark chocolate. Read the full Bir Kar guide.
• Borogoru, from Pentecost, a balanced-to-heavy cultivar with a slow, deep, mellow calm that comes on later than you expect and rewards patience. Read the full Borogoru guide.
• Puariki, the rare "elder brother" from Tongoa, smooth and nutty with a euphoric-then-relaxed arc and a famously clean next morning. Read the full Puariki guide.
• Silesse, from Malekula, the introspective creeper, less a social kava and more the one for a quiet solo night that you want to sink all the way into. Read the full Silesse guide.
• Pia and Asiyai. Pia builds slow and warm like Melomelo's cousin, and Asiyai comes all the way from Aneityum, the southernmost island, with its own distinct chemotype (246531), proof of just how much these islands diverge from each other.

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Heady or heavy: the simple way to choose

Here's the cheat code that'll save you a lot of trial and error, and it's the only framework you really need to start. In our category, "heady" means the lift lives more in your head, clear and a little euphoric and sociable, and "heavy" means the body, the sink-into-the-couch, wind-all-the-way-down end. Vanuatu's cultivars split pretty cleanly along that line.

• Quick and heady: Kelai, Palarasul, Bir Kar.
• Slow, warm, and heavy: Melomelo, Pia, Borogoru.

Most people figure out which camp they live in within a few sessions, and then it's just a matter of finding which jar is theirs.

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How we handle Vanuatu kava differently

We've been in this industry for over a decade, supplying specialty versions to kava bars and directly to our supporters. Our kava comes from specific noble chemotypes that are hand-picked from each varietal and grown on family farms. We have agreements to batch or machine-dry the roots immediately after they are pulled to lock in the juices. This creates an entirely different kava profile than the more economical mass sun-dried or oven-dried approach. Those methods still preserve the majority of the actives, but they lose many of the nuances within the chemotypes and give the drinks a much spicier tone. What others gain in volume and speed, they lose in complexity and potency.

If you want to learn the full traditional batching ritual someday, and it really is worth doing at least once, our First Timer's Guide to Kava walks through the whole thing.

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Where to start

If you already know your lean, go straight for it: Raw Epicure if you're heady and Connoisseur if you're heavy. And if you have no idea yet, which is completely normal and honestly where most people are, the Variety Pack is the move, because it lets you taste across the range and find your style instead of betting a whole jar on a guess. Most people who try the range end up loyal to one or two cultivars for years; they just needed to actually meet them first.

Then once you have a number of jars under your belt and have tuned into the voice of kava, you can dive into our single-origin Reserve Variety Pack or full reserve jars to experience the spectrum of cultivars that most of the public has never and may never experience.

Again, I'm not the all-knowing kava elder, and I'm still learning new things about these cultivars every season, but if you start anywhere, start in Vanuatu. It's not just the homeland by reputation, it's the homeland by blood. It's the place the plant itself came from and the people who fought to keep it alive through a century when it would've been easier to let it go.

From our ohana to yours, mahalo nui.