American kava is officially on the map with the first mix yesterday of American-grown kava produced specifically for the American kava drinking market.
Produced by the American Kava Growers’ Group, a collective of American kava growing pioneers, American-grown kava is a significant shift in kava as a crop associated exclusively with Pacific island countries and known to be grown only in the Pacific region due to its cultural significance.
“There’s definitely a difference between American cultivars and Pacific cultivars,” Tyler Blythe, co-founder of Kali Kava and Root of Happiness Kava Company and Bars told The Fiji Times.
“The American cultivars that we have here comes from the Pacific, they came originally from Hawaii but they’ve been grown here for 33 iterations. So, in the same way that Pacific people have taken kava from, say, Tonga and grown it in Fiji and selected through positive traits that Fijians like, Americans have taken Pacific kava grown in Hawaii and we’ve selected for certain traits and characteristics that we find desirable.”
Through acclimation, adaptation and an accelerated natural selection process, the group has created unique kava varieties that are now grown in South Florida and can also be grown in coastal Southern California.
The group’s goal is “to produce the finest kava varieties on earth and establish American states and territories as the next specialty kava growing regions.”
n More on this story in The Fiji Times on Monday
