Elliot Moss
Welcome to Jazz Shapers with me, Elliot Moss, bringing the shapers of the business world together with the musicians shaping jazz, soul and blues. My guest today, I am very pleased to say, is Amy Taylor, Co-Founder and Director of Tap Social, a craft brewery and social enterprise employing and supporting people in prison and prison leavers. Having worked across the criminal justice system, including as an auxiliary police officer in Toronto and most recently as a senior policy advisor at the UK’s Ministry of Justice, Amy saw how the system was failing prison leavers as they tried to re-enter society. Re-offending rates were over 50% - you heard that right – yet the strong link between stable, secure employment and a lower rate of re-offending was not being sufficiently addressed. In 2016 Amy set up Tap Social with her partner, Paul, a criminal barrister and sister, Tess, who’d worked in the criminal justice system as a counsellor. Bringing together their passion for social justice and good beer, their community taproom worked closely with a nearby prison and offered training support and employment opportunities too. Tap Social has since grown to six sites and a team of fifty, with around a third having experience of prison and they’ve created over 85,000 hours of meaningful, paid employment for prisoner and prison leavers to date. Tell me, it’s great to have you on. How did the Canadian firstly end up in the UK? That bit intrigues me obviously, for those of you who don’t know, Amy started life in Toronto but came here and when, when you came here, why was it that you came here?
Amy Taylor
I came over in 2012 to do a Masters in Criminal Justice Policy and Social Policy, so I was in London at LSE for that and then I decided I hadn’t experienced enough of London yet and so I, I got a job working first with the Courts and then moved into the Law Commission doing legal research and then worked for the Ministry of Justice in policy for a few years.
Elliot Moss
And that connection with law and the connection with, I’m going to call it justice in the broadest sense, where did that come from for Amy before Amy then moved into the world of beer? And we will connect law and beer in a moment or rather justice and beer actually, where do you think that burning sense of stuff just isn’t right came from for you?
Amy Taylor
Yeah. It’s interesting. I think when I was growing up, I always wanted to be a lawyer. I felt really sure about that and in Canada you can’t study law as an undergrad so I studied criminology instead and once I started learning about criminology and sociology as well, my sort of interests changed a bit and I felt that I wanted to have a different role, I didn’t want to be really part of the system as much, so I decided to work across the system, learning as much as I could about how it all fits together and how it works before being able to sort of step outside and do something a little bit different.
Elliot Moss
And then that move from the world of kind of the Ministry of Justice and the like, how did the, tell me about the beginnings of Tap Social and how the germ of the idea began.
Amy Taylor
We wanted to set up Tap because we wanted to create training and employment opportunities for people in and coming out of prison. I spent a lot of time walking around prisons, speaking to prisoners when I was working in policy and both my partner, Paul, and my sister, Tess, who are two of the co-founders had both worked in the system as well. Paul is a criminal barrister and Tess had worked as a counsellor and we saw that there was a huge amount of waste and also a huge amount of isolation and it just didn’t, it didn’t make a lot of sense. We were brainstorming ways to try and get people to come together and hospitality sort of felt like a good way of doing that but at the same time we were spending a lot of time in craft breweries in London, we all lived here at the time, and the sort of inclusive and vibrant spaces that are the craft breweries and the brewers, they felt like a really amazing opportunity to bring people together. Breweries have really low barriers to entry for employment, they’re really inclusive spaces and there’s loads of transferable skills involved in brewing, so you have everything from the sort of chemistry behind the brewing to the sales and marketing and advertising and warehousing, delivery, everything, there are lots of different types of skills but more than that, the tap room and events space that we built with the brewery gave us a really amazing platform to bring different people together, to create networking opportunities, gave us a platform to be able to spread our messages of the importance of inclusivity and the importance of being able to feel like you are part of a community and to be able to get a job after prison.
Elliot Moss
So, Amy, three people come together, one is your sister, one’s your partner, Paul, one’s a lawyer and the other one, Tess you were saying was a counsellor and what else was she?
Amy Taylor
She was a counsellor, she also had a lot of hospitality experience.
Elliot Moss
Okay, so the world of hospitality is there. So you are now, you’re in, I just want to go back to the picture of the three of you discussing this and you’ve got the barrister and I know lots of barristers, you’ve got you who’s come out of the Ministry of Justice and I know lots of people in the Ministry of Justice and I’ve got Tess and I know lots of people who are counsellors. The three of you, you wouldn’t say ah, here are three entrepreneurs and yet, here we are eight years later talking about this thing that you’ve created, six sites, 50 people, thousands of you know hours of time. In those early moments, did the three of you look at each other and say, this is a cool idea but we’re, it’s not going to happen, it’s never going to work, is this crazy, are we being crazy?
Amy Taylor
It’s a fair point. Tess and I grew up in Canada but with parents who started a company together, so they worked really hard and worked together and so I think that is probably had a lot of influence on both of us really, growing up in a house and watching our parents run a business and I think the idea of starting something myself and working with Tess as well was always something that I really wanted to do, I was pretty sure that that was something that we’d love to do together and it was just about working out exactly what it was and it was important to me that we were able to combine those things that we liked, like we really enjoy hospitality and both have quite a lot of experience in it as well but also something that we really care about and that can do some good and improve what we see as a broken system really.
Elliot Moss
And did it feel like a risk at the time or did it, were you quite compelled between the three of you like, this is, this is feeling right, we’re just going to go for it?
Amy Taylor
It felt like a pretty massive risk really, we took out a personal loan, bought a second-hand brewery, quickly realised we needed somewhere to put it and so had to take out a lease on a big industrial unit in Oxford. The brewery that we bought our original brewery from, they kept calling us, saying, “you’ve really got to pick this up and take it away because we need the space” and so, at that time, it sort of all became real and it just sort of snowballed but I think you just have to jump in and have a bit of faith it’s going to work out.
Elliot Moss
I was in Scotland recently and I went to visit one of the whisky distilleries and there are these big vats of things, you know these big metal bits and obviously, brewing beer is not, is not dissimilar. That’s a thing, I mean that’s not like buying a Scalextric at Christmas, that’s like, you’ve just gone and bought a massive bunch of kit, I mean again, weren’t you a bit daunted by the idea that we’re now going to go, hey, what are you going to do? It’s like that, it reminds me of the film, Hey, We Just Bought a Zoo. Hey, we just bought a brewery, I mean, you say it as if you’ve just bought something small from Ikea but this is not that.
Amy Taylor
Yeah, I mean it gives it a certain sort of momentum when you’ve got some big steel tanks involved, I think.
Elliot Moss
That is the understatement of the year. I bet it does.
Amy Taylor
So, I think it’s quite helpful really in sort of getting you going and making it all feel really real because until you sort of commit in a big way, it could end up always just being a sort of concept and never actually getting off the ground but yeah, making your first big sort of purchase and making things…
Elliot Moss
Real.
Amy Taylor
Yeah, real, really helped with that, I think.
Elliot Moss
And then just, and briefly, and we’ll come back to lots, for lots more, but just in terms of getting the machine going at the beginning and you know finding out where to put the plug in and getting, you know, I mean I’m kind of joking but the actual machinations of brewing, was that relatively straightforward to find people that knew?
Amy Taylor
Yeah, we, so we spent a lot of time going around breweries, speaking to brewers, before we started, we spent a lot of time going around breweries and prisons speaking to brewers and prison governors because we wanted to make sure that the whole thing wasn’t just a completely terrible idea and so, we were doing some home brewing and we took some lessons ourselves and all of the brewers were incredibly supportive and said, “oh you can do it yourself, you don’t need to hire a brewer” but we thought we want to create something that’s a really viable business here, we want it to be amazing, the product has to stand up and we want to be able give people really sort of meaningful employment from the prison and that is going to require having an expert and so, we very quickly found Jason, who’s been our head brewer ever since and Matt joined us as well, he was a good friend from university and he’s been with us since the very start as well, he’s one of our co-directors as well, and so it was the five of us from the beginning and we went into the prisons and we met the prison governor and we met lots of the prisoners there and we pitched the idea and asked for feedback and asked if people would be interested in doing it and the governor was really supportive and the prisoners, unsurprisingly, were quite excited about the idea of coming out to do something different.
Elliot Moss
So, we can go and brew beer, that sounds like fun. Shall we do that or shall we stay inside?
Amy Taylor
Yeah.
Elliot Moss
Funny that, isn’t it. Stay with me for much more from my Business Shaper, it’s Amy Taylor, she’s the Co-Founder of Tap Social and they’re the people that brought the world of brewing to the world of prisons and the prison service. Much more coming up from her in a couple of minutes. Right now, we’re going to hear a taster from the Mishcon Academy Digital Sessions, which can be found on all the major podcast platforms. Mishcon de Reya’s Emily Knight talks to Charlotte Yonge, a fund manager at Troy Asset Management about why women historically invest less than men and what’s being done to change it.
You can enjoy all our former Business Shapers on the Jazz Shapers podcast and you can hear this very programme again if you pop ‘Jazz Shapers’ into your favourite podcast platform. My guest today is Amy Taylor, Co-Founder and Director of Tap Social, a craft brewery and social enterprise employing and supporting people in prison and prison leavers. So, the thing is now going, that the zoo has a zookeeper, the brewery has a brewer and everybody’s happy. Let’s just jump forward to now. Here we are eight years later and now there are people coming in, you’ve got six sites, there’s your brewing and obviously the beer itself is lovely, though I haven’t tasted any yet, I must admit but I will, I will resolve that issue, yes.
Amy Taylor
We can resolve that.
Elliot Moss
You can send me, yes, I was hinting there, very nice, good, we can resolve that and also, if I get the chance to come and have a drink locally, I will do that too. What’s the reception been like over these years and has it changed? Have people got either more used to the idea of what you’re doing or have they warmed to the idea or have you had to have a lot of conversations about the prejudice that people might have around, you know, people that are currently in prison or that have left prison or is it just a non-issue? I’m just really interested about the various things that have been going on in the world of the people buying the beer.
Amy Taylor
I mean there have been some mixed reactions but generally speaking, the reaction has been really positive. One of the reasons for choosing to start up with the brewery was because it felt like a really exciting and engaging way of getting people interested in work who maybe hadn’t been in work before and had been excluded from more traditional forms of employment and in the say way, the idea of bringing prisoners into a brewery to brew beer felt like an exciting and interesting sort of edgy enough idea that it could get people talking about it and that’s what we wanted to achieve because part of what we’re about at Tap Social is raising awareness of some of these issues and hoping that other employers and other people will sort of open their minds a little bit to this idea and sort of get on board with it as well. The reception has been really good. I mean, a lot of people just don’t really think about it. When we think about crime, there is a lot of attention paid to the trial and the sentencing and the big moments in the media and then after that, we send people to prison for a long time and we kind of just forget about them and most of the time, almost everybody is going to be released and so we need to think a bit more about who we’re releasing onto the streets afterward and we really think that it’s in everyone’s interest and when we speak to people about this, they tend to agree, I mean, it just, it makes a lot of sense, we have 42% of prisoners reporting that they spend over 22 hours a day in their cell, I mean, if you spend 22 hours a day on your own in a tiny little box and then you’re let out after ten years, how are you going to be able to function properly in society if you’ve gone from a situation where you don’t make any decisions at all, to having to make infinite decisions every single day, every single thing that you do and so, it’s really about just getting people to realise that this is a problem, it’s a huge issue.
Elliot Moss
And have you already got some stats which say that the re-offending rates have gone down based on people that have come through your programme?
Amy Taylor
We have, yes. For people who are unemployed, the re-offending rates are 59%, the national re-offending rates within a year. For people who are employed, they’re 39%, so that’s already a 20% difference in re-offending rates. For people who have worked with us, the re-offending rate is 7% so, it’s quite a big difference and that, I think is just down to having a really good community around people, having a good support network as well as permanent, stable employment. When we set up Tap, we initially envisaged it being a sort of temporary work placement where people would come out to us on day release but then would probably, once they finished their sentence, go back to wherever they came from and at that point their employment with us would end but what we have actually seen is that a lot of people have chosen to relocate to Oxford and to stay on because it just makes such a huge difference having that continuity when there’s so much else that’s changing, when there’s, it can be a real cliff edge moment when you’re released from prison, you have to rebuild your family relationships, you have to find somewhere to live, you have to do all of the sort of basic admin things like maybe setting up a bank account for the first time, maybe trying to get your driver’s licence back, all of those kinds of things so, having some sense of stability and routine and a community of people around you that you’re comfortable with and that support you is a really important and protective factor against re-offending.
Elliot Moss
You’ve grown the business, so we’re just getting to the, I’m just interested in how actually the three of you, back from then when it’s like we went and bought a brewery to this very laudable social justice centre. At some point obviously, as you said, you used the word ‘viable’, this business has to be viable. How have you found that balancing act where it had to be proof of concept it’s going to work, spoken to the governors, got people in, and now actually, the P&L has to work, the numbers have to work. Has that been an adjustment for you or has that been a natural sliding scale of okay, now I’ve got to manage all these different facets of what is called a growing a business?
Amy Taylor
We’ve always been clear from the outset that we wanted to create a viable business, we wanted to be able to prove the model, to prove to other employers and the world really, that this makes sense as a business decision, employing people from prison is a good idea and it works and so, we can’t achieve that or we can’t make that point if we aren’t able to stand on our own two legs and so it’s always been a concern for us and we’ve wanted to keep growing, I think whilst we set out with a very clear idea of what we wanted to achieve on the impact side, we weren’t as clear where we were going on the sort of commercial side.
Elliot Moss
Yeah, that’s what I was wondering about actually because you kind of, you’re, the starting point is so purpose driven but actually, getting into the nuts and bolts and the weeds of everyday business, being part of that myself, it’s hard work.
Amy Taylor
Yeah, it is, and it’s not been the best time to be running a sort of hospitality organisation either, the last few years has been fairly relentless but I think as we’ve grown, so we started out with our original site, brewing site, and then we had the taproom on that site, that continues to be our main sort of taproom and event space and we hold events there several times a week, every week, but then after that we kept the original brewery but we got a second sort of more production brewery. The opportunity came up to have a space nearby and so we took it, it was quite early on but just about manageable for us and then after that, we realised that the sort of hospitality side was a really good opportunity for the guys coming out to us from prison. Hospitality, it gives you a really good opportunity to improve your confidence and after years of being sort of isolated and separated from the rest of society, it’s a really good way to interact with members of the public and just build up that sort of confidence again in quite a sociable, nice environment and so we decided to open some more hospitality venues. Those were sort of delayed and moved around a little bit because of, first the pandemic, but we managed to, we opened up a pub and then we have a couple of smaller outlets, one in the covered market in Oxford and one in the Castle Key shopping centre, independent food market, called Lock 29 in Banbury.
Elliot Moss
Just looking at those things themselves, even though on their own that’s a lot. The packaging, I look at, I love the packaging, you know the aesthetic of the brand is cool, the story is obviously, it’s not constructed, it’s the truth, it’s like we did this for this reason versus brands importing great purpose onto what they’ve been doing for 300 years and suddenly pretending there was a reason they’ve always done it like that, which of course, all of us know is not true. You haven’t washed this with anything, it is, it began somewhere but then you’re on your own two feet because you’re competing against other businesses that don’t need a purpose, the beer just tastes great, the vibe is just good. Have you been sort of focussed on how do we be as competitive as we can be and has that been more, more people coming in to help you with this thing?
Amy Taylor
Our brand is very much about inclusivity and so that means having a really wide range of different types of events so, one of the best things about it, I mean we are a brewery but we’ve always tried to be as family friendly and have a sort of really wide demographic or customer base as possible and that’s always been our strength and so I think that’s helped to see us through and I mean, I think people sort of recognise the social mission behind the brand and have wanted to support that.
Elliot Moss
Fantastic stuff. Stay with me for my final chat with Amy Taylor. And we’ve got some Emma-Jean Thackray for you as well here on Jazz Shapers, that’s in just a moment, don’t go anywhere.
Just before we finish up, if that’s the word, I feel like I’m saying, “Last orders” which is ridiculous, apologies for that but I couldn’t resist. It’s Amy Taylor, she is the Co-Founder at Tap Social. The future, now you’ve done the hard yards, I feel like you’ve done the hard yards, which is can you tell a story and to the system as it were and you have and now you’ve got proof of concept, quite a lot of proof of concept, you’re now doing these collaborations, Redemption Roasters, which is actually, there’s a Redemption Roasters very close to Mishcon de Reya’s offices in Central London. I remember, and I forget the name of the social enterprise that did it, there were little cakes that were made in Café Nero’s years ago, where they were, they were made by prisoners and it’s, Timpson’s, I’ve had Sir John Timpson on the programme a number of years ago, he had that going. You feel like there’s been a bit of a we have a problem here, we need to not forget what happens when prisoners go into the system. We need to not have 22 hours of isolation and think it’s all going to be okay ten years later or five years or two years, it’s not. What are you now looking at? If the first six years was about the creation and alerting the world to the change, what’s the next six years going to be about for you?
Amy Taylor
We have big plans for growth so, a third of our team has a experience of prison either is currently serving or recently released from prison and we intend to always keep that target as the kind of the proportion of the workforce that should be made up from that background but we hope to grow and so we are, we are always sort of on the look out for partners that will help us to reach our full ambition both on the hospitality side and on the production side, so we have, last year we set up Proof Social Bakehouse which is our bakery and café, that’s been really successful and so we’d like to sort of take all of the best bits of what we’ve done and roll more of those out creating more and more jobs for prisoners and prison leavers and raising the profile of the brand and the social mission behind Tap Social.
Elliot Moss
Because actually to me, the thing is systemic, right, I mean if you’ve got this great idea and you’ve got proof of concept then obviously scale isn’t just about Tap Social size, it’s about, it’s about infiltrating, it’s about affecting change by getting a whole bunch of partners and a whole bunch of the system, which you know well, to say you know what, we need to actively do this. Is that something you’re doing from an advocacy, lobbying point of view as well or do you do it sort of you know street by street, partnership by partnership?
Amy Taylor
We have been involved in the Employment Advisory Boards in a couple of prison so, my partner, Paul, is currently the Chair of the Employment Advisory Board at Bullingdon and so those boards are set up specifically to link prisons with labour markets and increase employment opportunities for prisoners there. We’re also sort of always, yeah, on the hunt for good partners that can help us to raise the profile of the issues. You’re right that there’s been an increase in the number of big companies and also smaller organisations that are working in this area and so that’s really encouraging.
Elliot Moss
In a non-exploitative way because of course the history in America was quite opposite, you know literally, prisoners were massively exploited for many, many years by some of the biggest companies in the world. We’re not talking about that.
Amy Taylor
No, definitely not.
Elliot Moss
I mean that, because the change is, how do we integrate the justice system with the world of business and the world of profit making so that people can, as you said, find their communities. It just feels like, it feels like a big issue for anyone in power wherever you sit politically, I feel like that’s the, that’s almost the uber challenge for Amy and the team to address.
Amy Taylor
Yeah, I think everyone knows what the right answer is. Politicians know what the right answer is, are, and it’s about giving politicians I think the confidence to be able to make the decisions that make sense. So, part of what we are doing, I mean we have this, our cans all feature prisoner artwork.
Elliot Moss
And they’re vibrant, I suggest people go and have a look. Tap Social, what’s the website?
Amy Taylor
They are vibrant, very vibrant.
Elliot Moss
Tapsocialmovement.com.
Amy Taylor
That’s right, yes.
Elliot Moss
That’s right, yes.
Amy Taylor
And they also feature little facts about the criminal justice system and these are sort of just little bits of information that give the consumer just kind of can pique their interest a bit and get them to think a little bit more and maybe visit our website and find out a little bit more about these issues. We have a sort of metric called Cans in Hands and so, whilst we grow our impact through direct employment, we also hope to grow our impact in a much more significant way by raising awareness and so our next big move is, is to have our cans available in supermarkets so that people can see the brand, they can learn a little bit about the issues and hopefully get a bit more involved, either, whether that means, you know, making recruitment decisions at their work and being a bit more openminded about employing people that have a criminal record or whether it’s about being a bit more openminded in the way that they vote or talk about criminal justice issues and the more people that understand and are unafraid to speak about these issues, the more confidence politicians will have to make decisions that make sense. That’s the sort of aim of Tap Social. Direct employment so that we can prove the concept, prove the model and also raising awareness so that others can do the same thing.
Elliot Moss
I love both of those goals. I wish you a huge amount of luck because I think it’s, it goes to the very heart of the kind of societies that we all want to live in. It’s not just about the beer but the beer has to be good and it sounds like it is. It’s been lovely talking to you, Amy, thank you so much. Just before I let you go back to the brewery or the second brewery or the bigger kit or whatever you’re doing next, what is your song choice and why have you chosen it?
Amy Taylor
Thank you very much for having me today, it’s been, it’s been really nice. My song choice is I’m On My Way by Rhiannon Giddens and Francesco Turrisi. For me, it’s a song about hope and also some uncertainty about the journey ahead. It was performed by Rhiannon Giddens at HMP Wormwood Scrubs in 2019 as part of the London Jazz Festival and so it feels like a really appropriate song to choose.
Elliot Moss
I’m On My Way there from Rhiannon Giddens, featuring Francesco Turrisi, the song choice of my Business Shaper today, Amy Taylor. She talked about the commitment of the co-founders at the beginning of their journey. Buying a brewery doesn’t get much more committed than that. She talked about the importance of community, not just in the business sense but in the sense of prisoners being reintegrated back into society. And also purpose, the fact that this business is predicated on purpose, it’s all about purpose, it’s all about systemic change and how truthfully, many other businesses import it elsewhere and later down the line. Great stuff. That’s it from Jazz Shapers, have a lovely weekend.
We hope you enjoyed that edition of Jazz Shapers. You’ll find hundreds more guests available for you to listen to in our archive, to find out more just search Jazz Shapers in iTunes or your favourite podcast platform or head over to mishcon.com/jazzshapers.