Georgia Tech Grad Brews Up A Taste Of Her Grandfather's Homeland
By: Tony Rehagen Photographs: Eric Medsker Photography | Categories: Alumni Interest
When it came to college, Zahra Tabatabai had no choice—she was going. Tabatabai is a first-generation American whose parents had emigrated to the U.S. from Iran in 1978. “College was absolutely mandatory, not up for discussion,” she says. “Otherwise, you get the speech about how they left their home to build a better life in America, and they weren’t about to let us throw away that opportunity.”
Her parents probably couldn’t have predicted that, after four years earning a degree in business from Georgia Tech (Mgt 03), their daughter would find her American Dream not through her New World education, but through a family tradition rooted in their homeland: brewing beer.
Today Tabatabai is head brewer and sole proprietor of Brooklyn’s Back Home Beer, a fast-rising name in the world of craft beer. The moniker stems from the fact that her grandfather, Gholam-Reza Fakhrabadi, had brewed his own beer using the sumac, lime, and orange blossom from his own garden back home in Iran, before the 1979 Islamic Revolution made the production, sale, and consumption of alcohol illegal. Fakhrabadi died when Tabatabai was just 3 or 4 years old, but her mother and aunts frequently invoked memories of “Baba Joon’s” (Farsi for “Dear Father”) home brew in the family’s Atlanta kitchen while she was growing up.
While the seed of Back Home Beer had been planted in Tabatabai’s mind at an early age, it was slow to germinate. After four years studying business at Tech on the HOPE Scholarship, Tabatabai ventured into journalism. In 2005, she moved to New York, first writing for ESPN, then Fox News. Eventually, she began freelancing and considered enrolling in law school. But in 2020, an offhand comment from her grandmother (“Maman Joon”) about how she missed the taste of her late husband’s beer from back home inspired Tabatabai to get cooking. She set up shop on the tiny gas stovetop of her Brooklyn apartment and started mining her grandmother’s memory to try and reconstruct Baba Joon’s lost recipe. She would bottle each promising batch and stow them in her checked suitcase for the flight back to Atlanta, where her family would taste and provide feedback. Once Tabatabai and her testers were satisfied that they not only had product that approximated the old home brew but also had something to offer modern American drinkers, the notion of opening a brewery took hold.
In Tabatabai’s mind, Back Home Beer would not only honor the memory of her beloved grandfather, it would also embody the rich history and culture of his native land. Today, due in large part to Islam’s complicated relationship with intoxicating beverages, people tend to think of the Middle East as a vast alcohol desert. But the truth is, beer was born there. The earliest evidence of humans fermenting an ale-like beverage with barley dates back 5,000 years to Mesopotamia, present-day Iraq and parts of Syria and Turkey. And the people who were brewing this primitive precursor to beer were almost exclusively women.
Tabatabai wants to tell this ancient story, but she also wants to dispel the notion that the modern Middle East is a monolith of teetotalers. “It’s hard as a people to have your history erased,” she says. “We want other people to be educated about this connection we have to beer-making; we want to reclaim what is ours. So much of my early support came from the Middle Eastern community here; so many Iranian and Iraqi people are very proud. They want people to realize that we dance, drink, party, and eat great food.”
Back Home Beer officially launched in 2021 with a contract brewer helping Tabatabai release two flagship beers: The Persian Lager with its dash of Persian blue salt from Iran is the closest approach to Baba Joon’s beer; the Sumac Gose is a sour bursting with the flavors of sumac and sour cherries, both ingredients her grandfather grew in his garden. She oversaw everything from production to the art on the cans to personally delivering cases all over the city in her weighed-down Prius. Soon, she enlisted her brother to distribute in Washington, D.C., where he lived. In Fall of 2023, Tabatabai tapped into the reputation her upstart business had grown to launch a Kickstarter campaign for a brick-and-mortar Back Home taproom and Middle Eastern street-food eatery that pulled in $125,000, the largest drive for a brewery in the platform’s history. She is currently scouting possible locations in Brooklyn.
Even though brewing beer was about the farthest thing from her imagination when she arrived on campus at Tech, Tabatabai says she has used much of her college experience to get Back Home Beer to where it is—and not just her business classes. “Tech was a very intense program,” she says. “You really have to be a person who doesn’t procrastinate, uses time wisely, and is efficient to survive an environment like that. Those things all translate to owning your own business.”
Whether she’s using her Tech diploma or not, her family is still plenty proud: In December 2024, Back Home Beer became available in Atlanta, her hometown, where her parents, aunts, and Maman Joon still live. “They’re happy I’m continuing my grandfather’s legacy, their legacy,” she says. “They can share it with their friends, similar to what Grandfather was doing in Iran. Cook big meals, have friends over, and drink his beer. They can recreate these memories.”
