Lacons Brewery Virtual Tour: Bringing the Past into the Present

Take a trip to a museum and you never know what you might find. On a good day, you’ll get the place to yourself and loads of time to peruse the exhibits at your leisure. Other days however, particularly when the weather gets out or during the school holidays, you might be more hard pushed to really get to see everything that’s on offer.

Insight Virtual Tours offers a different perspective. Every aspect of the tour is captured in full, glorious colour allowing people to explore museums at their own pace, taking as much time as they like to take in every snippet of information – and this was how Insight approached a project to transform Gt Yarmouth’s famous Lacons Brewery into a digital format.

Norfolk icons don’t come much bigger than Lacons Brewery. Its history stretches way back to 1640, when the Falcon Brewery was launched in Gt. Yarmouth by Jeffrey Ward, laying the foundations for what would later become Lacons. At one point the business owned over 300 public houses in the bustling fishing town and notably supplied over 20,000 pints of beer to celebrate the final defeat of Napoleon.

With this rich history in mind, when Lacons invited us to create a virtual tour of their brewery, we were both excited and honoured in equal measure. Using our industry leading Matterport software, we took the time to carefully transfer the real life tour experience into a digital format, without leaving any of the details by the wayside.

Check out the tour either on our website – or you can even go directly to the Lacons website and launch the tour from their about us page. The idea behind the tour was incredibly simple – we sat down with the leaders and supporters of the brewery and discussed using the technology of today to bring its past into your present.

As you might have guessed we used the industry leading Matterport virtual tour software to perform a complete capture of the site. From the moment you launch the tour, you get that real world immersive feeling, strolling up the central passage of the brewery, pausing to take a glimpse at the iconic Lacons sign.

You can almost smell the hops in the air as you progress down the brick lined passage, before taking a right hand turn into the museum. Straight away you’re introduced to some of the oldest remaining photos of Lacons from the earlier half of the 20th century – and in classic Insight fashion we’ve helped give the exhibits a whole lot more life with the introduction of our information points.

Interested attendees can browse through some of the classic earthenware used to transport Lacons beer or even watch a BBC video on the yeast used to make the beer, a sample of which has been saved as part of a preservation project. Pause in the cinematic room to take in an original 30 minute film that shows the brewery in operation way back in 1957.

And what brewery tour would be complete without a look around the gift shop? Wander through the stacks of beer at the end of your journey, with a chance to enter a competition to win some of the wonderful Lacons beer to complete your trip.

Interested parties all around the globe can sit down, crack open a cold bottle of Lacons (we think that Encore makes an ideal accompaniment for the tour) and explore their brewery at their own leisure.