Sovereign Kava

Sovereign Kava has been part of Asheville since 2010 — its own slogan is doing its part to keep Asheville weird since then — and its history is a small map of the city's kava scene. Keely Flow and Andrew Procyk left Florida in 2010 to open Vanuatu Kava Bar on South Lexington Avenue; it moved to Eagle Street in 2012 and became Noble Kava, spent a brief period on Haywood Road in West Asheville in 2015, and settled at 268 Biltmore Avenue in 2017, rebranding as Sovereign Kava around 2019. The bar sits halfway up the hill between McCormick Field and Mission Hospital, which is a meaningfully different stretch of Biltmore Avenue from the riverside Biltmore Village that flooded in Helene. It is dog-friendly with indoor and outdoor seating, runs live music every Friday and Saturday with no cover, and hosts an open mic that was voted Best of WNC in 2019. The Asheville Citizen-Times captured why people go: oddly enough, one regular said, this place is way more social than an alcohol bar. It opens daily from noon to midnight, later on Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.

What is served needs stating carefully. The bar's own description of its range is traditional kava made by hand the way it has been prepared ceremonially in the South Pacific for centuries, plus kava cocktails, Buchi kombucha, CBD edibles and tinctures — and "Mitra tea" in several varieties. Mitra is the venue's own name for products made from Mitragyna speciosa, which is kratom; the word kratom does not appear anywhere on its website. That distinction matters here more than almost anywhere else in this guide. Kratom is not a mild botanical: as Mountain Xpress reported when covering the region's kava and kratom culture, it carries some forty alkaloids, two of them close to those in morphine, acting as a stimulant at low doses and a sedative at higher ones, and the FDA advises consumers not to use products containing it. Sovereign Kava publishes no dosages and no warning text. Kava itself is psychoactive too. There is no alcohol here, and for some people that is exactly the point — but anyone in recovery should go in knowing precisely what is behind the bar.