The Karma House

The Karma House sits in a strip mall at 608 Garrison Street in Lakewood, and is structurally unlike almost every other bar in the Denver metro: it is a registered nonprofit, charity number 85-3216470, run as a community and event centre whose stated purpose is to provide alternative products and services that support healthy, sober living. The alcohol-free bar is the centrepiece of that mission rather than a side effect of it. Co-owner Nick Gnieski told Westword in 2023 that the appeal was social rather than pharmacological: "It's nice to have an environment where I can be social, relax and enjoy myself without getting intoxicated." The venue opens at 8am and runs to 3am every day, including holidays, which gives the western suburbs a late-night third place that does not require anyone to sit in a licensed bar.

What is poured needs stating plainly. The house speciality is kava, brewed from the root of the Pacific kava plant in the South Pacific tradition, and the bar also serves kratom and a range of herbal and botanical teas. Both kava and kratom are psychoactive: kava is a sedative-acting root, and kratom acts on opioid receptors. Colorado law restricts kratom sales to customers aged 21 and over, and the Karma House posts that restriction on its own site. For readers in recovery this is an important distinction — the room contains no alcohol at all, but it is not a soft-drink bar, and anyone whose recovery programme excludes psychoactive substances should know what is on the menu before choosing it. What the venue does offer that is genuinely rare in the metro is a room built from the ground up for people who are not drinking, staffed by people who are not drinking, at hours when the alternative would otherwise be a bar or nothing. Westword's 2023 survey of Colorado's kava and kratom scene put the Karma House alongside Boulder's Root Kava and Longmont's Colorado Mountain Kava as part of a wave of venues opening on exactly that premise.