Never Fear! New Reviews Coming Soon!

Fellow Kavasseurs,

I know. It has been ages. I have been working hard on a poverty alleviation program in southern Ethiopia for the past two years and can really own squeeze (not literally, as in kava root) reviews when I get to the states and get samples.

I am moving to Burundi soon and should hopefully have postal access. I have already set up a planned tasting and reviewing of all Paradise Kava's new items.

So stay tuned! And Stay krunked!

Tune in, turn on, krunk out,

Douglas

Paradise Kava's Fijian Sunset Kaduvu (2014)

Paradise Kava's newest batch of Fijian Kava has arrived. It is a low-cost, daily kava that is powerful enough to satisfy yet mellow enough not to slide into the next day. With Kavas from Vanuatu becoming exceedingly expensive and difficult to obtain, Fijian and Tongan varieties are becoming more affordable and available. This Kava should not be seen as a compromise, it should simply be seen as a good value. 

This video review tells the story of this awesome Kava. A stronger-than-normal Fiji that bowls the mind and body over. This Kava will satisfy you for a very low price and give you the Kava relief you are looking for on a daily basis. Enjoy..

Taste - 9/10

Mind - 10/10

Body - 9/10

Overall: 9.35/10

Paradise Kava's Vanuatu Blend No. 7 - Video Review

The Koniak Avalanche

Koniak sounds like something wintry: Klondike, frosty, Santa Claus, chilly, balaclava, icy, arctic, solid icebergs not at the precipice of collapse, polar bears on floating frosty islands. And, in fact, it suites the occasion quite magically. On a cold Ethiopian dusk, I finally broke open my bag of Koniak to a nice earthy smell – quite expecting peppermint but settling for the smell of roots blended with nitrogenous soil – that wasn’t at all off-setting (certainly not as off-setting as the wave of pleasure that melted like a cap of ice over my brain moments later). I had been warned on the Kava Forums to not make big plans for the next day. Alas, that wasn’t possible – I had to wake up at dawn and drive down a perilous road to a farm in the highlands to check on the progress of a sweet potato project. But as I am writing this in a Koniak-induced buzz and quite enjoying the twinkling starlight of the southern hemisphere, my plans for tomorrow seem as far-off as the disappearing polar ice caps.

Now, the Kava. It is divine. It is powerful. It is absolutely, positively – nay, dangerously – overpowering. It is definitely one of the most potent Kavas I have had and could bowl over a newbie like an avalanche. In fact, it did. One of my co-workers dipped in and was soon pondering the real meaning of words. No man, I mean the real meaning of words. Words like: fiddlesticks, diphthong, wombat, mollycoddle, bluesocks, grown-up. We were absolutely pealing with laughter – pealing like ice from the top of a sloping lake during the Spring. We were absolutely and thoroughly stoned. We reminisced on old surfing stories from California and islands faraway. All from the crown of the world in the Ethiopian highlands.

Now, I can say that the effects of this Kava are incredibly immediate. The minute it has gone down the hatch there is the imminent sense of senselessness. Muscle aches? Gone. Wretched knots in your back or limbs? Gone. Sense of time? Devastated. On that last note, I really mean it. I started throwing this Kava down the hatch at 7 P.M – throwing down another shell every ten minutes for another hour or so – and at 11 P.M was still wide-awake and pondering really funny, fluffy things. Things like snowflakes and snow angels. It has power and endurance. I warned you.

Surprisingly, this Kava has a wonderfully clean and milky taste. It has undertones of a nuttiness – maybe a hint of cashew or walnut. The flavor melts into the numbness quite seamlessly. One minute you are enjoying the flavor (yes, I have said before that I enjoy the flavor or Kava) and the next minute you are – again – sensing senselessness. It tastes like a Fijian or Tongan blend but hits like something from Papua New Guinea combined with something from the Solomon Islands. So either Judd has a lab somewhere where he is baking up new varieties of Kava or he has truly stumbled upon some magical village in the south Pacific and made really good friends. I’d anticipate the latter.

This Kava is highly recommended. Definitely one of the best I have ever had. Certainly one of the most powerful. 

Flavor 9.7/10

Effects (Mind) - 9.8/10

Effects (Body) - 9.9/10

Strength - Strong, Very Strong

Bula Kava House's Koniak - 9.8/10

Mellow Mellow - Bula Kava House's "Melo Melo"

I typically work about 80 hours a week. I am an agricultural development facilitator in the Ethiopian highlands, where I have access to very few distractions from my job or the seriousness of my mission. On a day to day basis I have to perform a job that addresses hunger and food security. If you want to learn more about my work, check out the website of the organization I work for. So yeah, it gets stressful. But we all know that it is very important to mellow out every now and then. So, on a particularly stressful afternoon this week I decided to reach for a kava that seemed to fit the occasion – Bula Kava House’s “Melo Melo.” The name alone implies an anxiolytic product (look it up!), and its powdery grind with some lateral chips mixed in looks quite appetizing.   

Now let me be perfectly honest when I say that this is one of the best kavas I have ever had. Is it strong? Yes. Does it give you an amazing body-buzzing blow? Absolutely. But it really – and I mean really – mellows you out. I kind of picture the effect of this kava on me as being like a stiff board that steadily crumbles into a pile of dust. Or perhaps a candle slowly melting until the fire burns out and the fame rests into the wax. It is a combination of that Tongan stoniness, that Solomon euphoria (I felt this with Fu’u as well), and some of the minor excitability of a good light Vanuatu variety. When I say excitability, I mean it in a perfectly social sense. I drank four shells of this and danced around my compound listening to some Sierra Leonean music and enjoying the scent of some good incense. My co-workers were wondering what could have possibly gotten into me. “Some Melo Melo,” was my response.

Melo Melo is a light kava with a wonderful flavor and immediate impact. I brewed two batches of it in one night so as not to let the feeling drift off. With most kavas, I limit myself to two big pots. But with Melo Melo, I really wanted to keep the feeling alive. And that’s not because it is short-lived or wears off at an annoying rate (and there are definitely some kavas that do that), but because it just gets nicer and nicer as you let shell after shell fly down the hatch. I can say that I actually got legitimately krunked for the first time in quite some time on Melo Melo, but was still focused and sharp enough to be able to retire with a good book. I woke up the next day with a spring in my step and the clear intention of brewing up another batch that day.

This kava gives you a great body high, a focused head buzz, and an absolutely stunning sense of stress relief. I know this because I drank it on a particularly stressful day (ever had to put together a three-year budget for a poverty alleviation program? Believe me, it’s not a mellow affair). After my second shell (I actually drank it from a glass, because poor Kavasseur doesn’t have a shell out here in East Africa) I was completely relaxed, conversational, and had my mind completely off things.

In sum, this is a great buy. I’d love to keep a couple kilos on hand at all times…

Flavor - 9.5/10
Effects (Mind) - 9.5/10
Effects (Body) - 9.5/10
Strength - Strong, Medium-lasting

Melo Melo 9.5/10

Fu'u: Casual Euphoria

When I first gathered my kava making materials together – a sieve, a big stainless-steel bowl, and a scattering of half-coconut shells – I glanced suspiciously at the bag of glorious root that I had received from Bula Kava House (BKH) a few days before. It was full of the most finely-milled kava I had ever set my eyes upon. In fact, the grind was so fine that I decided to put it off one more night before consulting with BKH’s manager. I was afraid that I was about to brew up a gallon of instant kava, and I had three kava newbies that I was kneading for. I thought it was a risky idea to accidentally brew them a Kava purely composed of instant kava! In the meantime, I decided to have a go with Melo Melo (that’s a story for another day) and my co-workers and I drifted off into a Phish session while we slowly melted into the night.[1]

What I essentially asked BKH was: “are you sure you didn’t put the wrong kava in the wrong bag? Because I’m pretty sure you accidentally sent me a half kilo of instant kava.” This wouldn’t have been a horrible thing. Imagine a half kilo of instant kava! You could get krunked every day for a few months. But fortunately (or unfortunately) this wasn’t the case. It indeed was Fu’u. I wasn’t entirely convinced this was the case, but I decided to reassemble my kava chef station once again and get to work on this dusty, fine-scented powder.

Fu’u is, as I have said, very finely ground. It has very mild notes in powder form and, at least in an olfactory sense, is very enticing compared to some of the more pungent stuff out there. It resembles a combination of Fijian, Tongan, and perhaps even Solomon Islands kava. It is actually a “Noble” Tongan variety, meaning that it is reserved for Tongan nobility (of which there are still many, as Tonga is one of the world’s last monarchies). As Fu’u is already so well-ground, kneading it is quite a simple and relaxing exercise. (As if any dimension of the holy root experience needed to be any more relaxing!) It is surprisingly different from the Tongan varieties provided by some of the other Kava vendors out there, such as Nakamal at Home’s Tongan or Kava by Rex’s “Tongan Pride” (probably my least favorite Tongan variety available on-line.

Now, we all know that I absolutely love Nakamal at Home’s “Solomon Kava.” It tastes good, feels amazing, is easy to make, and even looks good. So let’s start with the taste of Fu’u. It is one of the most delightful kavas I have ever tasted. It has a full flavor, a milky-almond base, a coconut-milk-like texture, and it lingers on for a while after a generous swallow. Its numbing effects are medium-range, and that always throws me off (but this is a personal obsession of mine – that overwhelming tingling that a Papua New Guinean kava will produce is like a swim in a shimmering pool at the frothy base of a tropical waterfall for me). So yes, Fu’u tastes lovely and is brilliantly easy to drink. Even kava newcomers will likely find themselves in agreement with this. Or at least they will not make some asinine comment about kava tasting like murky pond water that has been infused with pine needle tea.

If I had to sum up the feeling of Fu’u, I would use one word: Euphoric. One could say the same of Solomon Islands kava (perhaps this is some kind of secret Tongan-Solomon hybrid?) or some of the other Tongan kavas out there. But Fu’u leans closer to the Solomon Islands camp. It inspires heavy eyelids (not to be mistaken with tiredness) and creative, laugh-inducing conversations. My co-workers and I had a bizarre session of grabbing books and reading random paragraphs out-of-context. It started out as a way of judging different writers’ abilities via randomly sampled snippets of their books (stick with me here) but then devolved into a kind of free-for-all session of blissful weirdness and inspiration. I’m not saying here that this kava is disorienting or overwhelming. It is fundamentally relaxing with that extra edge of stony euphoria. This is where it diverges from Solomon kava and leans more towards its country of origin, Tonga, with all of its pleasurable, social, feel-good essence. Whereas Solomon kava would compel you to crawl off into some cave and ponder the nature of the universe, this kava will make you want to repeatedly call for another “bula!” and laugh the night away.

Flavor - 9/10

Effects (Mind) - 8.5/10

Effects (Body) - 7.5/10

Strength - Medium Medium-Lasting

Fu'u 8.3/10

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[1] My co-workers and I all live together in a compound in the Ethiopian highlands, in case you were wondering why I was hanging out with my co-workers.

New Reviews Coming Shortly!

Hey Kavasseurs!

I am excited to announce that I have been invited to review the range of kavas that Bula Kava House has to offer at their online store. These reviews will be coming up sporadically over the next couple months, as I receive the samples. Keep checking this page for updates.

Greetings from Ethiopia!

Kavasseur