{"id":1109,"date":"2012-09-08T01:00:19","date_gmt":"2012-09-08T01:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.viggers.com\/roundtheworld\/?p=1109"},"modified":"2012-09-04T18:30:09","modified_gmt":"2012-09-04T18:30:09","slug":"tasting-notes-kava","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.viggers.com\/roundtheworld\/2012\/09\/tasting-notes-kava\/","title":{"rendered":"Tasting Notes \u2013 Kava"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Boy was I glad to see the meat grinder.<\/p>\n<p>Traditionally, an intrinsic part of making kava is the chewing \u2013 the root of the kava plant is passed out in chunks to a small group of friends and honoured guests, masticated thoroughly, spat out into a bowl, mixed with water, filtered through a cleanish sarong and drunk. I had been invited to watch the kava being made, and the presence of the new-fangled, hand-powered meat grinder meant that I wasn&#8217;t about to have to drink too much of other people&#8217;s spit.<\/p>\n<p>We are on the north tip of the volcanic island of Ambrym in Vanuatu, in Chief Sekor&#8217;s village on top of the cliffs looking out over the reef towards Pentecost Island, famed home of the Pentecost land divers. It is a very special place. We are a three hour boat trip around the coast from the nearest rough airstrip, and I am about to have my first bowl of <a title=\"kava\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Kava\" target=\"_blank\">kava<\/a>:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Appearance: cognac comes in a balloon snifter; Bordeaux comes in a finely-crafted Riedel glass; kava comes in a bucket<\/li>\n<li>Ritual: down in one, but slowly. It&#8217;s not so much about proving your drinking prowess as a necessity, there being half a dozen people and only one cup<\/li>\n<li>Colour: what comes out of the meat grinding, mixing, rough filtration process looks like incredibly muddy pond water. A muddy clay pond, to be precise<\/li>\n<li>Taste: an unmistakeable flavor of mud, a hint of vegetal cucumber, and an aftertaste of deepest Numb Mouth (which may be the sixth and most recently discovered axis of taste, with umami being the fifth)<\/li>\n<li>Impact: there seem to be as many different types of effect as there are kinds of kava root. Ours was a relatively old root, but not <em>really<\/em> old and therefore not <em>too<\/em> powerful. For some it can be pleasantly stupefying. For others, there seems to be no effect for a couple of hours, at which point you get a terrible puking hangover and an angry girlfriend without the fun happy drunk bits beforehand. For me, the numb mouth spread a little to my brain, but nothing too worrying. Nothing, that is, until I went to bed and lay awake for FIVE HOURS listening to the waves break on the shore below without being able to get to sleep<\/li>\n<li>Next morning: utterly exhausted, but otherwise right as rain. Just in time for the mind-bendingly extraordinary festival dances and pig killing ceremonies next day, of which more elsewhere<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>They are very proud of their kava on Ambrym. For some reason, the delicacy hasn&#8217;t travelled.<\/p>\n<p><img src=\"http:\/\/www.viggers.com\/roundtheworld\/wp-content\/uploads\/082312_1013_TastingNote1.jpg\" alt=\"\" \/><\/p>\n<p>[A truly artistique iPhone shot \u2026 of a pair of buckets]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Boy was I glad to see the meat grinder. Traditionally, an intrinsic part of making kava is the chewing \u2013 the root of the kava plant is passed out in chunks to a small group of friends and honoured guests, &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.viggers.com\/roundtheworld\/2012\/09\/tasting-notes-kava\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.viggers.com\/roundtheworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1109"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.viggers.com\/roundtheworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.viggers.com\/roundtheworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.viggers.com\/roundtheworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.viggers.com\/roundtheworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1109"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.viggers.com\/roundtheworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1109\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1213,"href":"http:\/\/www.viggers.com\/roundtheworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1109\/revisions\/1213"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.viggers.com\/roundtheworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1109"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.viggers.com\/roundtheworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1109"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.viggers.com\/roundtheworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1109"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}