Five Minutes With… Mosaic Tap Owner Isaac Vernon

You're only 23 now and were just 21 when you opened the bar - was your age a hindrance when you were starting out?

Really the only thing that held me back when I was opening was me! It took me a long time to even approach some of the guys in the other pubs, just introducing myself. I was just scared of them thinking I'm some 21-year-old kid who’s just got an inheritance or something - and pulled the money out of nowhere to open the pub - and it'll be closed in six months. But I’ve become a lot more confident, just saying 'Yeah, it's my age. I'm doing it.'

You studied in London but decided to come back to Newcastle. Was that because you missed the city or because it made good business sense?

A bit of both! I was really ready to come home, I really love Newcastle and I knew how good the beer scene was here, with a few great breweries in the city. I knew whatever loan I could get would be pretty small but I could contribute to that with my savings and lockdown furlough, and I still live at home. The amount of money I’d need would have been triple or quadruple that in London… and it was also coincidence - I was looking at both locations for a while and then I found the railway arch online and it all fell into place.

Did you start the bar with any particular ethos or mission and has that changed over the last couple of years?

We try to keep things really interesting on the beer front, and if anyone comes into the bar and says ‘I don’t like beer’, I’m immediately offering them a taster that they probably haven’t tried before, which is a good gateway into them liking something new. By the end of the night they’re asking me things like ‘what’s similar to this?’ or ‘have you got anything else?’and maybe they’ll come back a couple of times and though they thought they only liked lager, they try a real IPA and realise it doesn’t all taste like Neck Oil! 

I just want us to be a kind of gateway for people Of course, the aficionados don’t need any education, they come in all the beer places and know what they want and the breweries they love.

Has the craft beer scene in Newcastle changed since you opened and is it a supportive community? 

To be honest, it's probably got a bit smaller in the last couple of years, with places like Delta Lounge and Split Chimp closing and Beer Street being up for sale. But we all help each other out… those guys at The Town Mouse and Elder Beer gave me the confidence to carry on – ‘you don't have to be panicking, you’ve got the right ideas and your prices are in line with ours, just chill out!’ 

We all spread the word too. I’m constantly having people saying they’ve come from XYZ pub in Newcastle and someone sent them along. It’s just a great community.

What guides the beers you stock? Is it just the taste or is there more of a philosophy behind it?

Independent breweries are the baseline of it all - I try not to skew too far away from that. There are about 3000 microbreweries in the UK and every brewery employs between 3 and 20 people, so by buying their stock we're supporting all these independent businesses employing local people. It's why I don’t stock big names on tap – by buying them, you’re just putting a really small drop of money into huge organisations that are more like factories than breweries.

We’re a small island, there’s pretty much a brewery every couple of miles and I like to think we’re doing our part supporting them, keeping them open and employed just as much as I wanna be employed! That’s the underlying ethos – being independent and supporting people like us. If you start to lose that, you lose what’s important.

What's the idea behind hosting the open mic nights and things like that? Is it just to attract custom?

We've been running them since we opened. Whenever collectives like Canny Queer are free, they'll come in and do a night and I find a lot more people drink beer at those events now than maybe did a year and a half ago because they’re not going for a glass of wine or a vodka and coke, they’re coming up and asking what’s what. They tend to take a bit of a backseat over the summer as bands are off doing festivals but if a band wants to play, we're happy to have them.

Mosaic Tap is located in Arch 7 at Forth Good Yard and is open between 3pm and 11pm from Sunday to Wednesday and from 1pm to 11pm on Saturdays. Find out more at www.mosaictap.com.