Big Beach Brewing quickly and consistently has embodied the “small town” mentality of the Gulf Shores motto that also includes the drinking hole’s namesake. For all its nearly nine years of serving on-site crafted brews, growing and evolving into an iconic community space, one family has carried the torch.

Now, that torch has been passed.

But to the residents and visitors who know the state’s southernmost brewery as one with a personality akin to the community it serves, worry not. The new torch bearers have been there a time or two.

“We’re going to honor everything they’ve done and just be part of this experience because we love Big Beach, and we love Gulf Shores,” said Kevin Corcoran, one of the four new owners of Big Beach Brewing, located on the corner of East 24^th Avenue and East 2^nd Street/AL-180.

Corcoran and his wife, Domini, and their longtime friends Doug and Tammy Warren closed on the sale of the brewery on Monday, April 14, from Jim and Julie Shamburger.

The Shamburgers opened Big Beach in October 2016 and have run the business, a 10-barrel brewing system with six fermenters that produces a combination of 12 consistent and rotating beers on tap, with two of their children, Ryan and Millie. Now, with their children having moved away, Corcoran said, they felt it was time to move on, too.

“They came to me on Halloween day, and we talked about it,” Corcoran told Gulf Coast Media Monday.

From serving non-alcoholic Pensacola-made Big Jerk soda and merchandise you can see sported by locals in every corner of town and returning visitors across the country, from the patrons who bring their newborns, their vacationing relatives, their dogs, to the patrons who go to watch sports or taste the newest seasonal release or return to their internationally awarded taps, to those who come for the beer and stay for the eclectic lineup of live music, Big Beach’s popularity is not defined by one type of customer.

They’ve recently added programming like trivia on Mondays (no cheating allowed) and music bingo on Tuesdays (cheating with Shazam encouraged) and reinvented its food menu by expanding to an in-house kitchen. They consistently win in Gulf Coast Media’s Best of Baldwin readers choice contest.

“It’s obviously some place we wanted to hang out,” Julie Shamburger said in an interview with GCM in 2017. “We built it that way.”

It became a place where the Corcorans and Warrens wanted to hang out, too.

Kevin Corcoran is president of the Gulf Shores City Schools Board of Education in addition to he and Domini owning RE/MAX of Gulf Shores. Doug Warren is president and CEO of Community Health Systems. They met in 1996 and worked together on the local education task force.

Now, their friends who meet at the brewery need only to text each other the emoji of a window. Who’s free? See you at Big Beach.

The two couples were trying to open what they were going to call Gulf Pours on AL-59 in the former RE/MAX building. But why start over if what you already have works so well?

“We were trying to become another Big Beach, and this opportunity arose for us to take over, and we couldn’t be happier,” Corcoran said.

“Locals and temporary locals know this place and love this place, and we love it, so it’s a perfect match,” Warren said.

When they talked to the staff to introduce them to the ownership change, Corcoran said, he brought a piece of paper with “all the things we’re going to change. It was a blank piece of paper.”

“We have so much faith in the current management system. We plan to change very little,” he said.

Amber Dion, who was promoted to general manager at the end of 2024 after Ryan Shamburger and his family moved to California, has been leading some of the new programming and said she sees “opportunity for growth in the future.”

Her back-of-the-house counterpart, a critical component in the head brewer, is also a new (ish) face. Chris Gadd has been leading the charge in the taproom after Rod Murray, who launched Big Beach with the Shamburgers, officially retired in June 2024. Gadd, a former newspaper journalist who ran and owned a brewery in Tennessee, trained under Murray for around a year before the paddle passed.

“It’s the best-case scenario for us,” Dion said. “They very easily could have gone national with it, and this could have become Big Brewhouse or Big Corporation or who knows, and then that would have turned us into a whole different direction.”

The Corcorans and Warrens will inevitably put their own mark on the gathering space, but they are quick to hold reverence for the family that brought it this far. The wood of the bar and long tables still represent the family’s hand-made work put into its vision. The awards on the walls and snowbird patrons who return year after year like a migratory call to home are receipts woven into the community.

“Small town, big beach” may pertain irrefutably to some marrying of the city and its only brewery within a 45-minute drive, but it seems time to add to it.

“We have our motto through this,” Corcoran said. “New ownership. New energy. New horizons.”