It started in Florida
America's first kava bars opened in Florida in the late 1990s, out of Fijian and Tongan community networks rather than out of the wellness trade. Nakamal at Home in Boca Raton — run by one of the growers in this Association — is among the founding businesses of the American kava bar industry. Florida remains the centre of gravity for American kava commerce, and the state's history is the closest thing the culture has to an origin story.
The Documented History of Kava in Florida →California turned circles into an industry
California's kava culture began the same way — Pacific Islander community circles, in homes and church halls, long before anyone sold a shell commercially. What followed was different from Florida: a commercial kava bar industry, and later the first serious attempt to grow kava on the mainland. Both of the Association's research greenhouses trace back to that shift.
The Documented History of Kava in California →Who drinks it now
A nationally representative survey of 2,000 US adults found 10.7% reporting past-year kava use, with the home the most frequently reported setting at 59.4% of users and kava bars reported as a purchase setting by 33.7%. The drinker is no longer only the bar regular. And the communities keep widening — one Association study documents adoption among young adults from strict religious Eastern European families, for whom an alcohol-free social drink fills a specific and previously unmet need.
Source: Mamallapalli, J. et al. Prevalence and use patterns of kava (Piper methysticum) in a US nationally representative sample. J. Ethnopharmacol. 2026, 355, 120617.
Kava Adoption in Young Slavic Adults →A tradition being made, not inherited
What is forming here is not a transplanted nakamal and not a wellness product. It is a genuinely new thing, assembled out of Pacific Islander diaspora practice, American commercial invention, domestic agriculture and a steadily broadening circle of drinkers. The shell still passes, the bilo is still emptied in one, and someone still says bula — but the room, the hours, the music and the reasons people came are American. Documenting that as it happens, rather than reconstructing it later, is one of the reasons this Association exists.
Ethnogenesis of American Kava Culture →
