As we talked, laughed, and savoured our midday feast, half a dozen pre-teen boys appeared out of nowhere, each carrying what looked like a recently removed white sweat sock. But this wasn’t Vanuatu’s version of the Backstreet Boys. No, their task was to prepare our kava. Conventional wisdom has it that virgin boys make the best kava. To do this, they chew on chunks of the plant’s root, spitting the juices into a split coconut shell, mixing them with coconut water and then straining them through coconut fibres. Abandoning all that ceremony, our crew spat the bubbly grey fluid straight into their sweat socks and squeezed the juice out into coconut shells, which they passed around for all to sample. It turns out that a side effect of watching grimacing youngsters make kava is loss of appetite, and my coconut shell was still meters away when the side effect kicked in. Somehow, bat meat didn’t seem so unpalatable anymore, but when you are in the jungle with a hoard of enthusiastic locals who’ve gone out of their way to please you, saying “No” is not an option. In retrospect, perhaps faking my own death might have been.
“Thanks for the tuberculosis,” the doctor murmured when he’d drained his shell. And though tradition dictates you must empty your shell in one go, my challenge was not to empty my stomach in one go. My second gulp was heroic, and I was pleasantly surprised to see the locals had joined me in spitting profusely on the ground. “Phew!” I thought. “They must have found the bitter, dirt-like, tongue-tingling kava disgusting, too.” But no. Another Ni-Vanuatu tradition requires that after imbibing, you thank the gods and ancestors by fervently returning some of your kava to the soil. Whatever, this was not the stuff of poetic tasting notes and certainly not a fair tasting. “when you are in the jungle with a hoard of enthusiastic locals who’ve gone out of their way to please you, saying “No” is not an option. ”
Back in Port Vila, Andy told me something he had known all along: every town and village has at least one nakamal, a hut where people gather to drink kava at the end of the day. In a town the size of Port Vila, we could easily find a commercial kava bar and sample its wares at our leisure. And though a local had assured us the chewing and spitting parts were essential so enzymes in saliva would increase the potency of kava’s active ingredients, commercial kava bars skip this step, instead grinding the roots by hand with a rough mortar and pestle and filtering the juices without salival assistance. Walking up a gentle slope to a low cane hut, we joined a couple of other visitors, paid our fare and sipped the muddy juice slowly from plastic bowls. Still, the jungle experience was fresh in my mind. Before taking my first swig, I made sure the kava makers were not armed with sweat socks. On the tongue, kava’s earthy, leaf-mould aromas translated into garden soil, mildly peppery spice, drying bitterness and the numbness of dental freezing. Bowls are not ideal for analytical tastings, but kava is one dram that would not benefit from a Glencairn.
Curiosity satisfied, we retired to The Melanesian’s lounge to cleanse our palates repeatedly on another local beverage – Vanuatu Tusker Beer. No soil, no boyband spit, no pepper, no bitterness, and at 5% abv, no numbness either. So, if someday you find yourself in Vanuatu and are likely to be drinking kava, remember, Tusker probably pairs well in a boilermaker with Pepto Bismol.
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the whisky explorer magazine
the whisky explorer magazine
FALL 2024
FALL 2024
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