The Craft Brewer Who Is Betting Maui’s Future on Kava

Kyle Fleming spent years building Hawaiʻi’s only hard kombucha brand from the ground up. Now, through Vaui Social Liquids, he’s turning his attention to kava — one of the Pacific’s most culturally significant plants — and the fast-growing world of non-alcoholic beverages that actually deliver.

There’s a particular kind of founder who is most alive at the edge of a category — not chasing trends, but reading them early enough to help shape what comes next. Kyle Fleming is that kind. A craft brewer by training, a kombucha pioneer by pivot, and now the person betting that kava is the most underestimated plant in the modern beverage industry.

His vehicle is Vaui Social Liquids, the sister brand to Pauwela Beverage Co. — the Maui-based fermented beverage company Fleming built from scratch over the past six years. Where Pauwela established his credibility as a maker, Vaui is where his vision gets to run.

“I was really inspired by the growth of the hard kombucha and functional beverage movement, and the broader shift toward people wanting drinks that feel better, taste better, and fit different lifestyles without compromise,” Fleming says. “There weren’t many truly great non-alcoholic or low-ABV options that delivered a real social experience and effect while still tasting like a crafted beverage. We wanted to solve that.”

Vaui Social Liquids is launching a full lineup of kava-based beverages: sparkling kava teas, non-alcoholic kava beers, and kava-forward mocktails. 

The common thread is kava — a root with deep roots across Pacific Island cultures, traditionally prepared and shared as a social and ceremonial drink, and now finding a new audience among consumers looking for something functional, craft, and genuinely different from anything else on the shelf.

The timing is deliberate. The non-alcoholic beverage market is one of the fastest-growing segments in the industry, and Fleming has watched the category evolve long enough to know that most of what’s out there still feels like a consolation prize. Vaui is built around a different premise: that a non-alcoholic drink should be just as considered, just as crafted, and just as worth choosing as anything with alcohol in it.

“We wanted to create drinks that meet people where they’re at, whether they’re drinking alcohol or not, without it feeling like a second-tier option,” Fleming says.

The response at Expo West — where Fleming exhibited as part of the Hawaiʻi Pavilion — confirmed the momentum. Distributor and co-packer relationships on the mainland are already in motion. National distribution is the near-term goal, and for the first time, it feels within reach.

Fleming is careful about how Vaui engages with kava’s cultural significance. The plant is not his heritage, and he doesn’t position it as such. What he does instead is lean into education, accessibility, and respect — making kava approachable for people who have never tried it while honoring the depth of what it represents.

“We’re not trying to appropriate or overstate cultural ownership,” he says. “We focus on demystifying kava and making it more accessible in a modern beverage format — meeting people where they’re at while giving them a real connection to the history and significance of the root itself.”

That approach shapes everything from the sourcing — working with local farmers and using Hawaiian varieties wherever possible — to the storytelling woven into the brand. Vaui isn’t packaging a cultural artifact. It’s building a bridge to it.

To understand where Vaui is going, it helps to understand what Pauwela already proved. Fleming moved to Maui from Jackson Hole with a brewing degree and a plan to open a craft beer brewery. Within months of arriving, he pivoted into kombucha after an opportunity to take over an existing production space — a plant he’d never made before, in a category he’d never worked in.

“Kombucha — something we originally had no intention of building around — ended up becoming the foundation of everything we do today,” Fleming says.

Pauwela is now Hawaiʻi’s only hard kombucha producer. In 2023, its ginger turmeric kombucha won a Good Food Award on a national stage. In 2026, the company received the SBA Manufacturer of the Year Award for Maui County. It’s recognition, Fleming says, of the deliberate choice to build real manufacturing infrastructure on island rather than outsource it.

The equipment, the production capability, the hard-won knowledge of how to make things here is now the platform Vaui gets to launch from. Six years of learning how to build in one of the most logistically difficult places in the country, put to work on the category Fleming believes matters most right now.

Both brands live inside a broader ecosystem that Fleming and his co-founder and wife Cady have built on Maui: a taproom designed as a genuine community gathering space. Live music, local food, markets featuring Maui vendors and makers. Kombucha on tap, kava beverages pouring, natural wine available through the club. Some drinks have alcohol, some don’t. And that’s exactly the point.

“The company is about social connection,” Fleming says. “Our taproom and broader ecosystem are all built around the idea of a landing space where people can gather over thoughtfully made drinks. Some have alcohol, some don’t, but they all serve the same purpose: bringing people together.”

Fleming’s favorite product in the Vaui lineup is still in development — a hazy IPA-inspired kava tea that bridges his craft brewing background with the functional beverage frontier he’s now staking out. It’s the product that most honestly captures what Vaui is trying to do.

“It takes something I’m genuinely good at — building expressive, juicy hazy IPAs — and reimagines it in a non-alcoholic, kava-based format,” he says. “For me, it represents both creativity and craft, but also where I think beverage culture is heading next.”

His advice to founders reflects the same openness that carried him from beer to kombucha to kava: “Don’t hold on too tightly to your original plan,” Fleming says. “Hawaiʻi will test every assumption you bring in.”