Bula Kava House

Bula Kava House opened at 3115 SE Division Street on 22 March 2011 and was the first business in Portland to specialise in kava. Owner Judd Rench came to it sideways: he spent his late teens and twenties travelling, living in Southeast Asia and the Caribbean, and was working as a scuba instructor on the Big Island of Hawaiʻi in 2007 when colleagues took him to the local kava bar. He spent the following years sourcing root and looking for a room, and has run the Portland bar for fifteen years since, adding a second location in downtown Vancouver, Washington and a mail-order business that ships kava nationwide.

The drink is the whole menu. Kava is prepared traditionally and served in a coconut shell, with the available varieties changing day to day depending on what the bar has in — Vanuatu root is a house staple — and newcomers are walked through the ceremony that goes with a first serving: one clap, drink it in a single go, two claps after. Around the kava sit juices, loose-leaf teas, smoothies, acai bowls, sandwiches and Hawaiian desserts, so an evening here does not have to relocate for food. The room is deliberately unfussy, with sketchbooks and music put out for people to use.

For anyone not drinking, the useful fact is the hours. Bula runs to midnight Sunday through Thursday and to 1am on Friday and Saturday, which is bar time rather than café time, and it is busy in the way a bar is busy — regulars, conversation, people staying for a second and third round. Portland has real depth in zero-proof cocktails inside its ordinary bars, but very few rooms where the entire counter is alcohol-free after 10pm. This is one of them, and it has been one of them for longer than almost anywhere else in the country.

What to know before going, stated plainly because this site is read by people in recovery. Kava contains no alcohol, but it is psychoactive: a mild sedative and anxiolytic that numbs the mouth briefly, tastes earthy and peppery, and comes on slowly enough that first-timers routinely assume nothing is happening and order again too quickly. It should not be combined with alcohol or with sedating medication, heavy or prolonged use has been associated with liver concerns, and it is worth planning your journey home around rather than driving straight after. If your sobriety means avoiding mood-altering substances entirely, the juices, teas and food here are all separate from the kava, and the staff are used to the question.