The Mood Health & Wellness

The Mood opened in 2021 on Mundy Drive in Fishers and bills itself as Indianapolis's first kava retail provider and educator — a claim that holds up, since the metro had no dedicated kava room before it. The founder is a retired Eli Lilly scientist, Dr. Hatfield, whose thirty-year career was in immunopharmacology and bioinformatics; he runs the shop with Taylor Hatfield, who came out of the e-cigarette and hemp trades. That pairing shows in how the place is set up: the front is a well-lit retail floor of herbal supplements and hemp products, and the back is a kava bar with a lounge and a free-to-play arcade, hung with work by Indianapolis artists.

Kava is served by the shell in rotating flavours — piña colada and pumpkin spice among them — and the staff are unusually willing to walk a first-timer through strength, onset and what the numbness on your tongue means. Nothing here contains alcohol. But this is not an alcohol-free café, and the distinction matters for anyone in recovery: kava is psychoactive and mildly sedating, and the same counter also sells blue lotus, kanna, klip dagga, mad honey, CBD, hemp-derived delta-8 and delta-9 products and vapes. The room is 21-and-over for that reason. Taken on its own terms it is one of very few places in the metro where you can sit for two hours in the evening, drink something with an effect, play a cabinet arcade game and never be offered a beer — which, since Memento Zero Proof closed in Fishers in 2024, is a shorter list than it was. Hours run midday to evening seven days a week, to 8pm on weeknights and 9pm on Friday and Saturday, which is early for a bar substitute but late for a shop. Two further notes for anyone weighing it up. First, kava has a learning curve: the taste is earthy and bitter, the effect is gradual, and the staff will tell you to drink a shell and wait rather than order three. Second, because the retail floor and the bar share a room, the atmosphere is closer to a wellness shop with seating than to a lounge, and the crowd skews toward people who came in for a specific product. If what you want is a fully alcohol-free room with no psychoactives in it at all, the cat cafés and Orangily are the better fit; if you want an evening drink that does something, this is the metro's only real option.