KavaDen

KavaDen sits in units 10-11 at 7625 West Hampden Avenue in Lakewood, and the single most useful fact about it is the closing time: 3am, every night of the week, from a 9am open. Nothing else in the Denver metro's alcohol-free category stays open that late, and very little in Lakewood of any kind does. For anyone who works nights, keeps unusual hours, or simply wants somewhere to be at 1am that is not a bar, this is the answer on the western side of the metro.

The room has been designed with some care for what it is for. The bar itself is built as a curve rather than a straight run, lit with neon, and the layout is deliberately open with comfortable seating throughout. Music is kept low — the venue's own emphasis is on easy conversation rather than atmosphere-by-volume — and games and puzzles are left out on the tables for people to pick up. The effect that regulars describe is a room where strangers end up talking to each other, which is the specific thing a good kava bar is supposed to produce and the specific thing that is hardest to find without alcohol involved. Happy hour runs from 8pm to 10pm daily at half price, with additional slam specials at 12:34 both am and pm, which tells you something about the humour of the place.

One practical limitation: KavaDen serves no food at all. Plan around that, particularly given the late hours.

The drinks are kava first — the ground root of a South Pacific shrub, infused in water, alcohol-free, earthy, mildly sedative and numbing on the lips, drunk socially across Fiji, Vanuatu, Tonga and Samoa for around three thousand years. Around it sits a range of herbal preparations.

That range needs one honest flag, because this directory is read by people in recovery and the products are not interchangeable. **KavaDen's menu includes kratom teas and CBD options alongside the kava.** Kratom is the leaf of Mitragyna speciosa, a Southeast Asian tree; its principal alkaloids act on the opioid receptors, regular use produces tolerance and a genuine withdrawal syndrome, several US states ban it outright, and concentrated 7-hydroxymitragynine derivatives are the subject of live federal scheduling action. Kava carries no comparable dependence profile, which is precisely why a lot of people choose it. Both are poured from the same bar here. Ask which one is in the cup before you drink it — the staff will tell you.