Berkeley’s MeloMelo Kava Bar introduces the Bay Area to Polynesia’s favorite mind-altering, take-no-prisoners drink.

Whizzing from the tap into a halved coconut shell, the liquid swirls, then settles, looking like storm runoff. Sniffed, it exudes curiously little fragrance. Swigged, it tastes, in one not-quite-quick-enough rush, like different things to different drinkers. Swigging, not sipping or even pausing contemplatively between swallows, but bold, chin-up chugalugging, is the classic and arguably only way to get this substance down.

Concrete comes to mind. Some say sawdust. Some say potato peelings.

Placing his drained shell on MeloMelo Kava Bar’s beautiful, satiny-smooth, sawn-from-a-single-slab-of-timber countertop, a man wearing a tropical shirt licks his lips and says, “Licorice,” optimistically.

Very optimistically.

But, hey: This stuff isn’t drunk for how it looks or how it tastes.

“You drink it for one reason and one reason only,” says MeloMelo’s co-owner Rami Kayali.

You drink it for what it does. Which is different things to different drinkers, but beverages made from the root of the kava shrub have been hailed for having sedative and other psychoactive properties in its native South Pacific for some 3,000 years.

Prepared in-house at MeloMelo vis-à-vis an industrial grater and the same sort of cheesecloth bags that are used to make nut milks, kava is called ‘awa in Hawaii, ava in Samoa, yaqona in Fiji, and Piper methysticum in scientific labs, including those of the FDA, which classifies it as not a drug, but a nutritional supplement. Globally speaking, it’s not a new high. But it has only been available via mail order in the United States since the early 2000s.

In the Bay Area, Kayali asserts, “Kava’s still completely off the radar.”

It won’t be for long. Kava bars thrive in Austin, Portland, Denver, and Miami. It was while swigging together at a South Florida kava bar that Kayali and his ex-stockbroker pal Nico Rivard decided to open one themselves. The two, who had spent fifteen years working in the food industry, were under the influence of San Pedro cactus, an experience that Kayali recalls “involved some purging.”

But where to open? Rivard’s fond memories of once having decompressed, post-Burning Man, in the Bay Area led the pair here.

“We thought kava would work well in infamously intellectual Berkeley, Rivard says, “because it’s not something that’s pretty on the outside. It’s something with actual character.”

Rivard is largely responsible, via inspiration and installation, for MeloMelo’s lovely, savvy, rustic-rumpus-room design: hipster-honeycomb wall accents; copper-backed barstools; marshmallowy couches sporting sketchpads, coloring books, and games including Cards Against Humanity: “Anything to keep your mind off your cell phone,” Rivard asserts.

“It’s not like walking into your typical alcohol bar. Instead, it’s like you’re one of my friends, walking into my living room.”

Monday is MeloMelo’s open-mic night. During Tuesday-night Jenga tournaments, players contend for $50 Visa gift cards. Upcoming movie nights should be extra fun for fans “who find that kava makes colors pop more,” Rivard muses.

Kayali and Rivard receive chunky taproots and tangly lateral roots, respectively resembling knucklebones and Halloween wigs, directly from Polynesian kava farmers, including one on Vanuatu’s remote Pentecost Island. They then pulverize, filter, hand-squeeze the kava and serve it steeped in plain water as the Purist and brewed in organic coconut water as the Melo Coco. Other preparations include a kava-chai combo, a kava colada, and the surprisingly delicious, Creamsicle-esque coconut-milk-and-cinnamon-spiked Kava Dreams cocktail.

No fermentation or other such process is required; kava’s effects are present in the raw plant. Kava is asexual, producing no seeds; Polynesian farmers have spent centuries selecting then cultivating the psychoactively strongest cultivars. Like wine grapes, those from different regions taste not quite alike: Fijian kava is comparatively creamy, Kayali says, while Vanuatuan kava “has more pepper notes.”

MeloMelo’s bestselling beverage is its Purist: After blurting a Fijian toast—”Bula!”—drinkers clap their hands once, then chugalug, then set down their shells and clap twice.

That’s when it starts: A transformation that isn’t quite like drunkenness and varies widely from drinker to drinker. Some report anti-anxiety effects. Some describe feeling simultaneously intensely relaxed and intensely focused. Some speak of elation. Some speak (as one is speaking, right here and right now) of a smiley-face mellowness that suddenly, and for hours hence, seems to make ordinary statements infinitely interesting.

That, and numb lips.

“It’s not an intoxicant in the same way that alcohol is an intoxicant,” explains Kayali, directing the curious to investigate kavalactones, those cyclic esters of hydroxycarboxylic acids that imbue kava with its psychoactive powers. Present in the drink, among others, are the local anesthetic kavain, the muscle relaxant/pain-reliever dihydrokavain, and the pain-reliever/sleep-inducer dihydromethysticin.

“Kava is an adaptogen, so it’s not addictive,” Kayali explains. “You cannot hate while you’re under the influence of kava. It slowly seduces you.

“It’s like being sucked into a warm river of chocolate.”

Because kava allegedly reduces social anxiety without impairing judgment, kava-influenced conversations “can be much more stimulating” than alcohol-influenced ones, Rivard observes. And, also in contrast to the alcohol experience, “You don’t usually regret things you’ve said in kava bars.”

Rivard and Kayali brew their kava much stronger than is customary in its native South Pacific, where, Rivard explains, the classic kava experience entails swigging a dozen or so weakish shellsful over six-hour spans, “basically from dusk until dawn.”

But your average mainlander won’t or can’t spend six straight hours in a bar—even a fun, crayon-equipped bar which also serves local kombucha on tap as well as tea, yerba maté, East Bay-baked Muffin Revolution muffins, Little Ladybug cookies, and kava-infused dark- and milk-chocolate bars.

Kayali compares a single MeloMelo Purist, strengthwise, to “three or four espressos in a single cup.

“We’ve had Fijians in here and, after drinking one of these, their eyebrows shoot straight up”—because it’s so much more potent than the kava they’re accustomed to, not because it tastes like mud or chalk.

In all honesty, kava isn’t really all that terrible. It’s only slightly-to-mildly terrible. As Kayali points out, coffee and beer—kava’s bitter partners on the flavor-wheel—taste kind of terrible the first few times.

And luckily for MeloMelo, the willful consumption of food and drink that can be characterized as “challenging” (looking at you, blood sausage and bone marrow) is a hipster hobby. Add in its exoticism, relative rarity, and the fact that it plays with your head, and kava might just become trendier than matcha.

“When we first announced that we were opening a kava bar in Berkeley, we were told that we’d get asked a lot of questions,” Rivard remembers.

“People in South Florida don’t ask many questions. They just come in, sit down and basically drink.”

MeloMelo Kava Bar

1701 University Ave., Berkeley
510-900-9316
MeloMeloKavaBar.com
Open Mon.-Sat. 12pm-12am,
Sun. 12pm-10pm
Food and drinks $2-$10.
No alcohol.
Accepts credit cards.