But for Tabatabai, “Baba Joon’s ab jo” (Persian for beer), was always a ghost.
Growing up in her family’s kitchens in and around Atlanta, Tabatabai learned to flavor dishes with traditional Iranian ingredients; barberries for rice, dried black limes and pomegranate molasses for stews. But Baba Joon’s ab jo — and simply the idea of Iranian beer — was a more elusive recipe.
The 1979 Islamic Revolution led to the prohibition of production, sale and consumption of alcohol. Tabatabai’s family arrived in the United States one year earlier, but it wasn’t until 2020, when Tabatabai was an adult, that an offhand comment from her grandmother (“Maman Joon”) inspired her to brew her birthright into reality. “She said she missed the taste of my grandfather’s beer,” Tabatabai said. “I thought I was a pretty good chef; brewing can’t be that hard.”
Turns out, it was. Tabatabai, 40, who at the time was working as a freelance journalist, had to learn how to brew beer in her Brooklyn apartment. She had to parse her grandmother’s fading memories of tastes and ingredients. She had to teach herself how to build a business from the ground up through scaling her recipes, manufacturing, packaging and distribution.
In October 2021, after months of trial and error at her tiny gas stovetop, stowing and shipping bottles back to Atlanta to get feedback from her family, and some moral support from the local brewing community, Tabatabai decided to open her own brewing company, Back Home Beer — in the middle of a pandemic.
“I thought maybe I’m creating something new and different; maybe this is something beer needs right now,” she said. “Maybe I can do this.”
Fifteen months later, Tabatabai’s nanobrewery is an unlikely success story. According to a recent audit by the Brewers Association, fewer than 24 percent of U.S. craft breweries are woman-owned, and only 2 percent are owned by a person of Asian ethnicity. Tabatabai is one of even fewer brewers making beer influenced by a part of the world that is not closely associated with the industry.
She believes that last differentiator, her Middle Eastern spin on familiar beer styles, will be the secret to her success in a saturated marketplace — and at the same time, help her empower immigrants and women in a White male-dominated beer world.
“It was really important for me to share our culture and bring something new to beer,” Tabatabai said. “I wanted to bring a new flavor and twist with ingredients that are popular flavor profiles in our cuisine. And I want to educate people about beer in that region.”
American-made beer is rooted firmly in European tradition. Even mass-produced American pale lagers, such as Budweiser or Coors Light, are just a lighter version of their Czech and German ancestors. Local craft breweries might advertise wild adjuncts such as sea salt, pickle brine, Skittles or doughnuts, but they’re still adding them to the same basic styles (pale ales, stouts, witbiers, pilsener and goses) that originated in western and central Europe.
The history of beer goes back much further, to a different part of the globe. The fermenting of ale-style beer using barley started about 5,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, present-day Iraq and parts of Syria and Turkey. And most of the ancient brew masters were women. “They were responsible for grinding grain for bread and beer; they often baked and brewed in the same spaces,” said Theresa McCulla, curator of brewing history at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. “The oldest known written recipe for beer is ‘The Hymn to Ninkasi’ (1800 BCE), a song of praise and thanks to a brewing woman goddess.”
While brewing in Europe developed independently (McCulla noted the primary brewers in continental Europe were women, too, until monks took over around 1000 A.D.), beer-making in the Middle East continued to evolve using the same universal combination of water, grain and yeast. Brewers would add flavors based on the ingredients around them. When Tabatabai’s grandfather was brewing in mid-20th century Iran, this would have included Persian blue salt, barberries, sour cherries, sumac and black limes.
These are among the tastes that Tabatabai gathered from her grandmother’s, mother’s and aunts’ memories. Next, she bought a home-brewing kit, consulted staff at local home-brew shop Bitter & Esters, and started bingeing brewing videos and tutorials on YouTube. As she tinkered with each recipe, Tabatabai would call her aunts for consultation, and occasionally fly back to Atlanta with a checked bag full of samples. Eventually, she returned to Brooklyn with the family’s final approval.
At the same time, she shared one of her creations, a barberry sour, with a local brewer who was excited to work with her to produce and release it at his Brooklyn brewery. When covid hit, the brewer moved out before the collaboration could become a reality. But the experience gave Tabatabai the extra validation she felt she needed, and in 2021, she contracted space at Staten Island’s Flagship Brewing Company and started rolling out kegs and cans for local consumers on her own.
Back Home Beer was born with the release of two beers. The Persian Lager is crafted to channel her grandfather’s brews: It’s a crisp, classic-style lager with a pinch of Persian blue salt sourced from Iran. The Sumac Gose is perhaps Tabatabai’s most personal, a slightly tart but not face-twisting sour that pours ruby pink and bursts with the zest of cured sumac sourced from a farm in Turkey and salt and sour cherries from Iran, all ingredients she knows her grandfather used.
The response to her releases has been overwhelming, Tabatabai said. In just over a year, Back Home has expanded availability to more than 200 bars and eateries in all five boroughs of New York and into Washington, D.C. Late last year, she added two new beers: Orange Blossom IPA, a zesty, hazy IPA with a dry finish; and Yalda Queen, another gose-style ale with pomegranate juice and puree. Now she is focused on finding investors to build her own brewing space that would enable her to scale up production and expand distribution, and a taproom. (She still personally delivers much of the beer herself, driving around the city with up to 50 cases of cans crammed into her Toyota Prius. Her younger brother, Amir, handles distribution in D.C.)
“I’d like to get the beer to the Southeast, where my family is,” she said. “And I’d love a space, ideally in Brooklyn, where there would be Persian street food. It’d be a place for people who might feel out of place at another brewery. That’s the dream.”
Back Home Beer is buttressed by a widespread enthusiasm that’s not solely focused on the beer, but also inspired by Tabatabai’s message of representation of gender, Middle Eastern roots and the larger immigrant voice in craft beer. And that message is resonating far beyond her distribution radius.
“It’s a huge win for the brewing community as a whole,” said Caroline King, whose Atlanta-based podcast, “Bitch Beer,” received a 2022 Brewers Association Diversity, Equity and Inclusion grant. “The more women, especially women of color, that we have in the higher-up positions and as owners, the better the industry can become for more women wanting to enter this industry.”
Tabatabai also continues to draw support from her most important audience — her family. “They have the beers in their fridge,” she said. “They’re very excited. They’re very happy that I’m bringing our culture into what I’m doing and continuing the family legacy.”
