Fiji Fresh Kava: new kava vendor

[FijiFreshKava]

Bula! Greetings kava aficionados, my name's Dave, the founder of a new online source for fresh Fijian kava at fijifreshkava.com.

I am an avid kava drinker and I live in a part of northern California where there has recently been a huge influx of people and great kava from the Pacific Islands. Like many of you here have found, the stresses of modern life can be helped by drinking kava! I really like the kava I get from the locals here, so I set up the web site so I can share it with the world.

There are a lot of great kava vendors out there, but I think we can offer a unique kava experience. Here's what is different about Fiji Fresh:
0. All our products are prepared in California from whole roots, so we can be 100% sure the kava has no additives, fillers, and no garbage in it.
1. We will pound the powder in small batches, fresh for you, from whole roots. The powder will be packaged and shipped in less than 2 days after the roots have been pounded. We will do one order per week, shipping on Wednesday morning so your kava arrives by the weekend.
2. Our kava is always sun-dried and never fire dried, and we do additional air cleaning and here in California so the taste is very clean.
3. We only use the lowest part of the stump and roots in our kava (as all good vendors should do).
4. We only use mature plants, at least 5 years old. We do not use plants in the 3-5 year range.
5. We will also sell whole, dried waka and lawena (roots and stump pieces).
6. (soon) we will also sell flash-frozen, fresh roots. We are currently working out the logistics for this.

A little about me: I'm a super small operation and I'm essentially leveraging many of the networks here that are already importing the whole roots from Fiji. I am a scientist (have a phd in laser physics) in my day job and and I hope to bring my background to better understand the biochemistry of Kava and finding new ways to do rapid, accurate field characterization. My company Fiji Fresh Inc. will be working in laboratories at Stanford University to conduct safety tests and research on kava.

We are in the process of getting set up to do business in California, so the website's store isn't open yet, but I wanted to let everybody know in case you have questions about what we're doing. Also, if you have any input on different kinds of products you'd be interested in, drop me a line a [email protected]. We should be open for business in about a month.

-Dave

Edit: 10/31/18
I'm excited to announce that at Fiji Fresh Inc. we are now doing same day order fulfillment, so you can get your freshly pounded kava ASAP! We're now pounding kava every day in small quantities just large enough to meet demand. Starting today, when you order online at www.fijifreshkava.com, we package the kava that same day and drop it off at the post office the following morning. Kava is guaranteed to arrive in less than 4 days.

 

[The Kap'n]

Bula! Greetings kava aficionados, my name's Dave, the founder of a new online source for fresh Fijian kava at fijifreshkava.com.

I am an avid kava drinker and I live in a part of northern California where there has recently been a huge influx of people and great kava from the Pacific Islands. Like many of you here have found, the stresses of modern life can be helped by drinking kava! I really like the kava I get from the locals here, so I set up the web site so I can share it with the world.

There are a lot of great kava vendors out there, but I think we can offer a unique kava experience. Here's what is different about Fiji Fresh:
0. All our products are prepared in California from whole roots, so we can be 100% sure the kava has no additives, fillers, and no garbage in it.
1. We will pound the powder in small batches, fresh for you, from whole roots. The powder will be packaged and shipped in less than 2 days after the roots have been pounded. We will do one order per week, shipping on Wednesday morning so your kava arrives by the weekend.
2. Our kava is always sun-dried and never fire dried, and we do additional air cleaning and here in California so the taste is very clean.
3. We only use the lowest part of the stump and roots in our kava (as all good vendors should do).
4. We only use mature plants, at least 5 years old. We do not use plants in the 3-5 year range.
5. We will also sell whole, dried waka and lawena (roots and stump pieces).
6. (soon) we will also sell flash-frozen, fresh roots. We are currently working out the logistics for this.

A little about me: I'm a super small operation and I'm essentially leveraging many of the networks here that are already importing the whole roots from Fiji. I am a scientist (have a phd in laser physics) in my day job and and I hope to bring my background to better understand the biochemistry of Kava and finding new ways to do rapid, accurate field characterization. My company Fiji Fresh Inc. will be working in laboratories at Stanford University to conduct safety tests and research on kava.

We are in the process of getting set up to do business in California, so the website's store isn't open yet, but I wanted to let everybody know in case you have questions about what we're doing. Also, if you have any input on different kinds of products you'd be interested in, drop me a line a [email protected]. We should be open for business in about a month.

-Dave

Hi Dave! You had me at "flash frozen". Thanks for letting us know about your business and yourself. This is very encouraging to read. Welcome!

 

[Krunkie McKrunkface]

Bula! Greetings kava aficionados, my name's Dave, the founder of a new online source for fresh Fijian kava at fijifreshkava.com.

I am an avid kava drinker and I live in a part of northern California where there has recently been a huge influx of people and great kava from the Pacific Islands. Like many of you here have found, the stresses of modern life can be helped by drinking kava! I really like the kava I get from the locals here, so I set up the web site so I can share it with the world.

There are a lot of great kava vendors out there, but I think we can offer a unique kava experience. Here's what is different about Fiji Fresh:
0. All our products are prepared in California from whole roots, so we can be 100% sure the kava has no additives, fillers, and no garbage in it.
1. We will pound the powder in small batches, fresh for you, from whole roots. The powder will be packaged and shipped in less than 2 days after the roots have been pounded. We will do one order per week, shipping on Wednesday morning so your kava arrives by the weekend.
2. Our kava is always sun-dried and never fire dried, and we do additional air cleaning and here in California so the taste is very clean.
3. We only use the lowest part of the stump and roots in our kava (as all good vendors should do).
4. We only use mature plants, at least 5 years old. We do not use plants in the 3-5 year range.
5. We will also sell whole, dried waka and lawena (roots and stump pieces).
6. (soon) we will also sell flash-frozen, fresh roots. We are currently working out the logistics for this.

A little about me: I'm a super small operation and I'm essentially leveraging many of the networks here that are already importing the whole roots from Fiji. I am a scientist (have a phd in laser physics) in my day job and and I hope to bring my background to better understand the biochemistry of Kava and finding new ways to do rapid, accurate field characterization. My company Fiji Fresh Inc. will be working in laboratories at Stanford University to conduct safety tests and research on kava.

We are in the process of getting set up to do business in California, so the website's store isn't open yet, but I wanted to let everybody know in case you have questions about what we're doing. Also, if you have any input on different kinds of products you'd be interested in, drop me a line a [email protected]. We should be open for business in about a month.

-Dave

Is that traditional hand pounded waka? If so I would be very interested. I do not know of any currently available in the US

 

[sɥɐʞɐs]

I clicked because of the word ‘fresh’...was quickly disappointed by the dry powder talk...got back on board with the ‘flash-frozen fresh root’ and Stanford scientist stuff.

I’m sure I’ll be DMing you soon.

 

[skip L]

Fantastic to see a new vendor! From the way it sounds you take a lot of pride in your work and the relationship you have with kava and the kava community! Excited to try out the products you will offer and hopefully continue to do so in a great way !
-skip

 

[FijiFreshKava]

Is that traditional hand pounded waka? If so I would be very interested. I do not know of any currently available in the US

Yeah, it's the traditional method of heavy rod pounding. It's effectively identical to what you see in this youtube clip: .
The modern way of doing it is to use a grog pounding machine like you see here: I'm attaching a photo of our machines so you can see what we do is very similar, actually kind of a cross between the two videos. (Our pot is very similar to the first and machine is like the second). The machines we use were built by a Fijian who lives in Sacramento and my colleague Rakesh pounds the roots at his local kava bar.

Thinking about this more, I wonder if there is a story about the type of pot. Probably nothing that isn't obvious like 'v' shaped to concentrate the root material underneath the hammer and the fact that it's metal so it can withstand heavy pummeling. I'll ask around and if there's something interesting I'll create a separate post.

 

[kasa_balavu]

Nice machines. The one on the right doesn't appear to have all stainless steel contact parts (required for GMP compliance).

Love the noise-reduction padding on the walls

 

[FijiFreshKava]

I clicked because of the word ‘fresh’...was quickly disappointed by the dry powder talk...got back on board with the ‘flash-frozen fresh root’ and Stanford scientist stuff.
I’m sure I’ll be DMing you soon.

Right. I get you. I know that 'fresh' in the kava community is meant to indicate undried kava, so I sometimes worry people might think I'm overselling what I have at the moment. For the record, my dream is to solve the logistics problem so I can sell kava in the mainland US in an unfrozen way. The USDA has issues with importing living plants that require more special permits, but (it looks like) flash frozen will pass through with no issues. I'll need to raise some capital or sell a lot of kava first to rent a staging facility in Fiji where I can freeze and store the roots. Fortunately, our pounding facility is right next to San Francisco International Airport where there are direct flights to Fiji every day, so it looks like we should be able to do it.

By the way, I've been experimenting with rehydrating whole dried roots with some success. Last week I took a piece of the stump (lawena) and soaked it in water for a few days. Initially it was rock solid, but after soaking, I could easily break it apart with my fingers. What was really interesting was that I could also then easily separate the makas (center part) from the lawena (the 'rind'). I continued to break up the lawena by hand and pureed it in water (not before chewing on a few pieces that turned out to be more juicy than I was expecting). The result after blending had a bright yellow film on the top, unlike anything I'd previously seen when blending dry powder. The taste was not nearly as earthy as what you get with dry powder. I didn't have enough stump from the experiment to make a very strong brew, but I was very pleased with the outcome. This process is something that could be followed with the whole roots we will sell.

I think I'll do a post in the future about rehydrating the dry root and show some pictures of each step. I thought about doing it at the time but was in too much of a rush to taste the final product!

 

[FijiFreshKava]

Nice machines. The one on the right doesn't appear to have all stainless steel contact parts (required for GMP compliance).

Love the noise-reduction padding on the walls

Thanks for pointing that out. The one on the right was a temporary daily replacement when the white one broke down and we don't have it anymore. I think there might be some flexibility for selling kava in the bar, but when we go live we will just use the one you see on the left.

 

[kastom_lif]

Nice machines. The one on the right doesn't appear to have all stainless steel contact parts (required for GMP compliance).

Love the noise-reduction padding on the walls

I wonder what the health inspectors would have said about old school ni-Van kava, pounded inside WW2 artillery shells with old truck axles?

Or even more traditonal methods. I'd volunteer to be a kava chewer!

 

[ThePiper]

Flash frozen would be awesome.

 

[Zaphod]

Awesome! The more good suppliers and vendors the better. I look forward to you getting up and running and providing us with another source of good kava. Any thoughts on how you will do testing for nobility, chemotype, KL% etc? I, along with others, advocate for good testing protocols and good labeling practices.

 

[Krunkie McKrunkface]

I have the equipment to do this myself, I guess, a heavy metal device I use for driving metal poles into the ground, and the metal poles. Just turn it upside down. Makes that exact same clanging sound as in the video of hand-pounding yanqona in Fiji. Hm. Don't think she'll let me. But I do love the taste of hand-pounded waka.

 

[kastom_lif]

I have the equipment to do this myself, I guess, a heavy metal device I use for driving metal poles into the ground, and the metal poles. Just turn it upside down. Makes that exact same clanging sound as in the video of hand-pounding yanqona in Fiji. Hm. Don't think she'll let me. But I do love the taste of hand-pounded waka.

Be careful not for confuse dakine T-post bangahz



wit dakine T-pose bangahz.

 

[FijiFreshKava]

Awesome! The more good suppliers and vendors the better. I look forward to you getting up and running and providing us with another source of good kava. Any thoughts on how you will do testing for nobility, chemotype, KL% etc? I, along with others, advocate for good testing protocols and good labeling practices.

I'm going to get technical, so I will give a brief summary and then a more detailed answer.

/Brief summary/ Chromatography is a technique for analyzing liquid sample constituents. It uses a material engineered to have a large number of surfaces. Molecules in the kava will are allowed to flow (either by pushing with pressure or by 'wicking') through the engineered material. Different molecules move faster or slower depending on the properties of the molecule and the timing or distance traveled along the material can indicate what type of kavalactones are in the kava. /end of Summary/

We're going to use a few different kinds of chromatography: HP-LC, TLC, and HP-TLC. I'll define these in a sec.

HP-LC (high-performance liquid chromatography) is pretty standard and can be done in many labs, but it's too expensive for regular use. Nakamalathome.com has a writeup from Alkemist Labs on the tests of their products. HP-LC can provide the relative concentrations of the different kavalactones (equivalent to the chemotype) and their total concentration. You probably know this, but If the kava has mostly kavain or dihydro-kavain, the main chemicals in the roots, then people usually say the kava is noble.

TLC stands for thin layer chromatography. It's also fairly well known to chemists, but it isn't as accurate in general. It's basically a test strip that you can use for quick analysis of a liquid compound. This video shows how simple it really is. The main benefit is that it's super cheap and doesn't require any equipment.


HP-TLC stands for high-performance thin layer chromatography. HP-TLC is TLC, but steps have been taken to make the whole process more accurate. Some of these 'high performance' steps are very basic like treating the thin film with a chemical to make visualization easier, or using an optical setup to quantify the results.

TLC and HP-TLC are where I'm putting my research energy. My current thinking is that TLC or HP-TLC could be a good way make easy to use field test kits, or kits for consumers (us!) who want to report what they're getting online.

 

[FijiFreshKava]

I have the equipment to do this myself, I guess, a heavy metal device I use for driving metal poles into the ground, and the metal poles. Just turn it upside down. Makes that exact same clanging sound as in the video of hand-pounding yanqona in Fiji. Hm. Don't think she'll let me. But I do love the taste of hand-pounded waka.

If you have a small quantity of dry roots I've found that stuffing it inside a clean towel and whacking it with a hammer breaks it up enough that you can then use a coffee grinder. About 15 seconds and you have a personal serving of freshly ground kava powder. This might me my new favorite thing to do at home.

 

[Krunkie McKrunkface]

If you have a small quantity of dry roots I've found that stuffing it inside a clean towel and whacking it with a hammer breaks it up enough that you can then use a coffee grinder. About 15 seconds and you have a personal serving of freshly ground kava powder. This might me my new favorite thing to do at home.

I shall attempt this within the next few days. Thanks for the suggestion!!! Got some choice Tongan lawena chips to do this with and some Fijian waka to mix in for depth, oh, and a $2 coffee grinder from a yard sale.

Just an aside, I am a very big fan of pounded Fijian kava, which is not commonly found for sale in the US. I find it..... "different" and I believe that Fijians like it for a reason and it's a pretty good reason or two. It will be nice to see it more available to more consumers. So thanks.

 

[Zaphod]

I shall attempt this within the next few days. Thanks for the suggestion!!! Got some choice Tongan lawena chips to do this with and some Fijian waka to mix in for depth, oh, and a $2 coffee grinder from a yard sale.

Just an aside, I am a very big fan of pounded Fijian kava, which is not commonly found for sale in the US. I find it..... "different" and I believe that Fijians like it for a reason and it's a pretty good reason or two. It will be nice to see it more available to more consumers. So thanks.

Can you describe the "difference"? I could see how pounded kava would possibly rupture more of the cell walls much like your freezing the makas and possibly make a stronger final beverage then just a grinder...but then again some of those large grinders must crush as well as cut pretty well.

 

[sɥɐʞɐs]

Right. I get you. I know that 'fresh' in the kava community is meant to indicate undried kava, so I sometimes worry people might think I'm overselling what I have at the moment. For the record, my dream is to solve the logistics problem so I can sell kava in the mainland US in an unfrozen way. The USDA has issues with importing living plants that require more special permits, but (it looks like) flash frozen will pass through with no issues. I'll need to raise some capital or sell a lot of kava first to rent a staging facility in Fiji where I can freeze and store the roots. Fortunately, our pounding facility is right next to San Francisco International Airport where there are direct flights to Fiji every day, so it looks like we should be able to do it.

By the way, I've been experimenting with rehydrating whole dried roots with some success. Last week I took a piece of the stump (lawena) and soaked it in water for a few days. Initially it was rock solid, but after soaking, I could easily break it apart with my fingers. What was really interesting was that I could also then easily separate the makas (center part) from the lawena (the 'rind'). I continued to break up the lawena by hand and pureed it in water (not before chewing on a few pieces that turned out to be more juicy than I was expecting). The result after blending had a bright yellow film on the top, unlike anything I'd previously seen when blending dry powder. The taste was not nearly as earthy as what you get with dry powder. I didn't have enough stump from the experiment to make a very strong brew, but I was very pleased with the outcome. This process is something that could be followed with the whole roots we will sell.

I think I'll do a post in the future about rehydrating the dry root and show some pictures of each step. I thought about doing it at the time but was in too much of a rush to taste the final product!

I've also spent years dreaming up ways to make fresh kava available stateside. Considered funding it by selling dry kava first too, but making that lucrative seems hard these days, considering the high market prices for wholesale root...unless you have your own farm or some familial connection to the growers that gets you better prices. I hope you can pull it off someday, I've never had fresh Fijian root and I tend to prefer Melanesian kavas to most Polynesian roots. Being that there are direct flight from Fiji to California, it seems a bit more doable than shipping perishable fresh roots from from Vanuatu (no direct flights).

I've also experimented with soaking dry kava, both powdered and whole root, it has it's benefits, but it can never replace what was lost and converted during the drying process. More is changed and lost than just the water unfortunately.

I'm also in California...and lookin' forward to trying your kava.

 

[sɥɐʞɐs]

Can you describe the "difference"? I could see how pounded kava would possibly rupture more of the cell walls much like your freezing the makas and possibly make a stronger final beverage then just a grinder...but then again some of those large grinders must crush as well as cut pretty well.

The benefit to whole root is that you get to actually know what you're getting, it gives you control over the amount of waka, lawena or blend amount and you know there aren't any stems or fillers in it. The only possible difference in effects between dry roots that were ground, milled or pounded in Fiji versus roots that were pounded in the States by the vendor or pounded in your backyard is the amount of time more surface area of the kava is exposed to air. That is to say, whole roots that are pounded right before you drink it might preserve a little more potency than stuff that was powdered several months ago and has exposed every part of the root to the air for a longer period of time.

I've had several kavas from different Indo-Fijian suppliers in California, importing whole root and pounding it here is a pretty common method for these guys. In my experience, it hasn't resulted in any notable difference in effects/potency, but I do like knowing the roots are legit and pounded more recently to my consumption of them. It does seem a bit 'fresher' that way, as far as dry root goes. Not in a perceptible way, but more so just the 'idea' of it.