Imbibe 75 Person to Watch: Samara Oster

Boston

On a trip to Peru, Samara Oster ordered a quinoa beer off a restaurant’s menu. Not knowing the difference between an ale and a lager (and admittedly still not fully fluent in beer styles), Oster was intrigued by the gluten-free beverage made from the country’s native grain. It wasn’t until years later that the Harvard grad was taking an entrepreneurship class in business school at the neighboring Massachusetts Institute of Technology that Oster revisited the memory of that unconventional beer.

One of the growing number of millennial consumers being more mindful of alcohol consumption and prioritizing digestive health, Oster saw an entry point to create a naturally gluten-free, sugar-free, non-GMO, vegan beer made with the high-fiber superfood.

“I was finding the usual suspects that I was going for, whether it was wine or a cocktail, would leave me passed out on the couch after one glass and waking up with a headache,” Oster says. “I just wanted an option I could enjoy that didn’t make me feel gross afterwards and could pair nicely with a meal or translate into different situations.”

Enlisting the help of two MIT food scientists, Oster experimented with more than 100 recipe formulations to create Meli, the first 100-percent quinoa beer produced in the U.S. Made with Royal quinoa sourced from Bolivia’s Uyuni salt flats, which Oster says is widely considered to be some of the highest quality and most nutritious quinoa in the world, Meli is a clean, crisp, easy drinker, clocking in at 4.4 percent ABV.

“It’s been so important to me to put a nutrition label and ingredients on the can because there’s so little transparency around these things,” she says. “When people start to be more mindful of ‘what am I putting into my system,’ they can make more conscious decisions,” she says.

Click here to read more about some of 2026’s other Imbibe 75 People and Places to Watch.