EP-333 Zahra Tabatabai of Back Home Beer

For all the power that memory provides us, its the connection to our senses that’s the most visceral. While we can close our eyes and picture loved ones or a perfect summer day, it’s the moment we smell a bag of candy or taste the right combination of spices that the past rushes back to life. Our eyes and ears can tell us about the present, but our nose and taste buds can be our time machine.
In this episode, we explore what it means to chase flavor memory with Zahra Tabatabai, founder and CEO of Back Home Beer, a fast-growing company based in New York City rooted in her family’s past. Zahra started homebrewing in order to recapture past tastes from her grandfather’s days of homebrewing in Iran as a way to bring those memories back for her family. A hobby soon became more, and now her Sumac Gose and Persian Lager act as ways to recapture the ingredients and flavors of the past.
As you’ll hear in this conversation, at the core of Zahra’s journey is her grandfather, Gholam-Reza, who was better known by his familial nickname of “baba joon,” a term of endearment that translates to “father dear.” Join me and Zahra as we talk about what led her to this moment, the speed of which her beer flies of shelves in New York and now Washington, D.C., and what it means to look back in time to bring something special into today.