Kava vs Kratom: What Is the Difference?

Kava and kratom are two unrelated plants that happen to share a bar. Kava is the root of Piper methysticum, a pepper family shrub from the South Pacific. Kratom is the leaf of Mitragyna speciosa, a tree in the Rubiaceae, the coffee family, from Southeast Asia.

Different plant, different part of the plant, different side of the world, different preparation, different menu and different age rule. Most writing on kava vs kratom blurs the two together. They are not versions of each other, and the rest of this page is what actually separates them.

Is Kava the Same as Kratom?

No. Kava and kratom are botanically unrelated, and neither one is a type, strain or form of the other.

The confusion is understandable. Both are plant based, both are served in kava bars, including ours, and both get called tea in some places. But they come from different plant families on different continents, and the parts of the plant that end up in the cup are not even the same kind of material. One is a root. The other is a leaf.

If you have only ever heard the two words together, that is probably why they sound like the same thing. They share a counter, not a family tree.

The Two Plants Side by Side

The clearest way to see the difference is to line the two up on the facts that describe the plant and the drink, not on anything about what they do to a person.

Kava is covered in more depth in What Is Kava?, from the plant to what goes into a shell. Kratom gets its own explainer as well.

A note on the family names, because they come up: being in the pepper family does not make kava peppery, and being in the coffee family does not make kratom coffee. The family is a botanical classification. It tells you what the plant is related to, not what the drink is like.

How Each Is Served at Kavasutra

At our bars, kava comes in a shell from the Kava Menu, and kratom comes as tea or an extract product from the Tea Menu. The two menus are kept separate on purpose.

Kava is prepared fresh every day from ground root and water. We pour three, Van, Guru and Newshyt, all from Vanuatu, in a single, double or triple shell, and there are concentrated specialties in the same servings. It is served cold and drunk in one go rather than sipped. The full list is on the kava menu.

Kratom on our menu sits on two sides. Brewed kratom leaf is our Brewed Tea, made in house and served hot from the kettle or cold and flavored. Extract covers items like #Boom, Shane’s Addiction, Stinger, the Stinger Can and Tea Drop. Red Top is genuinely both, kratom tea and leaf extract, and it is the one item on the menu with caffeine added. Kava itself contains no caffeine. Everything is listed on the tea menu.

One more line worth drawing while we are here. The 7-OH tablets, shots and gummies sold at gas stations are not kratom leaf either, and we do not sell them. That distinction has its own post.

Why People Mix Them Up

Kava and kratom get confused mostly because of where they are sold and what they are called, not because of anything about the plants.

Three things do most of the blurring. The first is the venue: kava bars across the country have added kratom to the menu, so a lot of people meet both for the first time on the same night, across the same counter. The second is the word tea, which gets used loosely for both, even though a shell of kava is not brewed at all. The third is the marketplace, where sellers of either one sometimes lean on the other’s name.

The fix is simple. Ask what plant it is, what part of the plant, and whether it is brewed, extracted or neither. Any Kavatender can answer all three for anything on either menu.

Age Rules, and Where Each Is Served

Kava is 18 and up at every Kavasutra. Kratom is 21 and up in Florida and Colorado and 18 and up in Arizona, where state law sets a different age.

This page is behind the same age check as the rest of our kratom content for that reason. Two more lines matter if you are planning a visit. We do not serve kava to anyone who is pregnant. And our Denver bar does not serve kratom at all, so the Tea Menu is not available there.

Nothing on this website sells or ships either one. Everything on both menus is served in the bar.

Ordering Either One for the First Time

Whichever one you are there for, tell the Kavatender it is your first time. The answer changes what they will point you to.

First kava? An Ed Shell or a Special Ed. Both are concentrated kava in a four ounce serving, and kava has what is called a reverse tolerance, which means the first few often land lightest. That is why first timers usually start on a specialty rather than a plain shell. If you want the full walkthrough, your first visit covers ordering, the shell and what the room is like.

First kratom? The small Brewed Tea, eight ounces. Tolerance starts low and there is no reason to start high. The stronger extract items on the menu are the ones we recommend to experienced kratom drinkers only.

We will not tell you one is better than the other, because that is not a question with an answer. They are different drinks from different plants, and plenty of regulars only ever order one of them.

Frequently asked questions