Vintage Kava

Vintage Kava sits at 141 Reems Creek Road in Weaverville, about ten miles north of downtown Asheville, and it is one of the more substantial kava venues in the Carolinas — not a counter with seating but a multi-room bar. The layout runs to a Main Bar Room, a space the venue calls The View, and a separate Elysium Lounge, with live music programmed regularly and local artists' work on the walls. It opens at 9am every day and closes at midnight, extending to 1am on Friday and Saturday. No alcohol is served at any point.

What sets it apart from the Asheville kava rooms already listed here — Sovereign Kava and Elevated Kava Lounge, both downtown — is its position in a small town rather than a tourist district, and the depth of its relationship with that town. It runs an annual Kava Campout. It has received recognition from the Town of Weaverville. And during Hurricane Helene, which devastated western North Carolina in September 2024 and cut power and water across the region for weeks, it functioned as a gathering space for the community. That is a stronger claim on a place than a good drinks list, and it is the reason the venue's own material talks about community involvement before it talks about kava.

The drinks themselves are kava-led, and the venue offers kava flights for anyone wanting to taste across preparations rather than commit to a single shell — a sensible option for newcomers, and the same approach the better kava bars elsewhere have converged on. Kava is the ground root of Piper methysticum, a shrub native to the South Pacific, infused in cold water and drunk socially across Fiji, Vanuatu, Tonga and Samoa for roughly three thousand years. It contains no alcohol. The taste is earthy and bitter and it numbs the lips and tongue on the first mouthful; the effect is mildly sedative and sociable rather than intoxicating in alcohol's sense. Kava also displays reverse tolerance, meaning regular drinkers generally need less rather than more to feel it, so a first visit rewards a slow pace across an hour or two.

For anyone staying in Asheville, Weaverville is a straightforward drive up US-19/23 and worth it for a room that stays open to midnight without a bar tab. For anyone living in the northern Buncombe County towns, it is simply the local — and one of very few places in the area open that late on any given night.