About the journal
A documented record of research on kava in the Americas — its agronomy, its chemistry, its safety and its culture — published by the people doing the work.
Aims and scope
The Journal of American Kava publishes research articles, methods articles, monographs and scholarly essays on Piper methysticum as it is grown, processed, prepared, sold and consumed in the Americas. The journal exists because a substantial and growing body of work on American kava — cultivar development, propagation under continental conditions, extraction chemistry, potency and authentication, regulatory history, and the anthropology of kava outside the Pacific — is produced outside universities, by growers, analysts and operators, and has for that reason been poorly served by conventional outlets.
Subject areas within scope:
- Agronomy and propagation — cultivar performance, nursery and field production, air layering, aeroponics and tissue culture, plant health, and production economics under continental US and Latin American conditions.
- Analytical chemistry — kavalactone and flavokavain quantification, chemotype determination, extraction and mass balance, HPLC/HPTLC/NIR method development, and botanical authentication.
- Processing and preparation — extraction variables, equipment comparison, microbial reduction, stability and shelf life, and the chemistry of traditional and commercial preparation methods.
- Quality, safety and regulation — standards and certification frameworks, contaminant and adulteration screening, and the documentary and regulatory history of kava in the Americas.
- Culture and commerce — ethnobotany, the anthropology of kava exchange and consumption, kava bar practice, and the history of kava's movement into American markets.
The journal publishes in English, continuously, and without page limits. It is online-only. It levies no charge on authors and no charge on readers.
Independence and funding
The journal is published and funded by the American Kava Association. It carries no advertising, sells no sponsorship, and accepts no payment from any party in connection with an editorial decision.
The journal's editors come from the American kava industry. The editorial board is Tyler Blythe, who founded the American Kava Association, Jeffrey Bowman and Travis Lowin, and all three have commercial interests in kava. That is deliberate: the people with the most practical knowledge of American kava are the people working with it, and the field is too young to have an independent academic community to draw on. It also means the editors have a stake in much of what the journal publishes, and several of them are its authors. How those interests are disclosed, and how papers written by an editor are handled, is set out in the editorial policies.
Relationship to the American Kava Association site
The two sites do different jobs. The version of record lives here — full text, formal metadata, and the citation that indexing services read. americankavaassociation.org carries the association's summaries, commentary and practical discussion of the same work, written for growers and operators rather than for the literature, and each of those pages links to the article of record on this site.
That split is deliberate. Research is only useful to the American kava industry if it is both readable by the people who farm and sell kava and citable by the people who regulate and study it. Neither audience is well served by making one document do both jobs.
Access and licensing
All content is free to read, without registration, and is published under CC BY 4.0 unless an article states otherwise. Guest papers republished with permission keep their author's terms. DOIs, indexing and archiving are described on the indexing page.
The journal does not offer document downloads: the full text on each article page is the published version.
Publisher
The Journal of American Kava is published by the American Kava Association, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA. Founded 2026. Editorial correspondence: editor@journalofamericankava.org.