The saloon that became a bourbon
If you grew up around the Eastern Shore in the 1970s and 80s, you know the phrase. “Drink with the Goat” belonged to the Judge Roy Bean Saloon, the roadhouse Jack West built on the outskirts of Daphne that became legendary for its music, its characters, and the actual goat that roamed the property happy to share a drink with a patron. The saloon is long gone. But the phrase — and now the bourbon — live on.
Judge Roy Bean Bourbon is the creation of David Gibson, a Fairhope entrepreneur and branding veteran who set out to build a distinctive small-batch bourbon with a local soul and national ambitions. The whiskey is finished with charred and toasted pecan wood, a nod to the coastal landscape that gives it a notably smooth, nutty character, and it is available in select ABC stores across Alabama, restaurants and package stores.
A marketing man’s second act
Gibson arrived at whiskey the way he arrived at most things — as a branding problem worth solving. He spent 18 years running Zeekee, the Birmingham digital marketing agency he founded, building websites and campaigns for clients including all of LuLu’s Restaurants, Bob Baumhower’s restaurants, and Jimmy Buffett’s Radio Margaritaville on SiriusXM. When one of his clients, Ride-On-Carry-On, appeared on the first season of Shark Tank, the site his company built was the only one that didn’t crash during the broadcast — which is how investor Barbara Corcoran came to hire Zeekee for her other portfolio companies.
He sold Zeekee to High Level Marketing in 2018, earned a StoryBrand marketing certification, consulted for a while, and decided the next venture should be something physical. He and his wife Kassady moved the family to Fairhope, and Gibson started asking a deceptively simple question: how do you get bourbon with your own brand on it?
The pecan idea
He took the question to Seth Dettling at Big Escambia Spirits in Atmore, who agreed to help on one condition: the bourbon had to be genuinely different. The answer arrived with the weather. When Hurricane Sally swept through the Gulf Coast, it leveled pecan trees across the region — and Gibson had his ingredient. He began experimenting with charred and toasted pecan staves in mason jars, learning the difference the hard way: char is darker and smoky, toasting is lighter and brings out sugar and vanilla notes. The combination of the two produced something he hadn’t tasted anywhere else.
Getting it to shelves took about a year and a half of regulatory groundwork — recipe, label and process all required federal and state approval, and the Alabama ABC Board had to agree the product would sell. “I think they thought I was kidding when I first approached them about a pecan-finished bourbon,” Gibson says, “but they agreed to try in the stores south of I-10 to see what happens.” What happened was sellouts. The first batch of 1,100 hand-bottled, hand-numbered bottles hit shelves in October 2022; batch two ran about 1,500 bottles; batch three grew again. A single-barrel “Jubilee Release” at barrel proof sold out almost immediately. The bourbon is now bottled in Opelika at John Emerald Distilling, though Gibson holds open the idea of a coastal distillery of his own if demand keeps building.
A brand with a hometown memory
The tagline is the history lesson. At the old Judge Roy Bean Saloon, the goat that wandered the grounds was famous for visiting with customers — hence “drink with the goat,” which is now both the motto and the domain name of Judge Roy Bean Spirits. “It was important to me to create a local product that feels like it could be a national product,” Gibson says. “I had fun with the goat, and it’s always fun to hear stories of people’s fond memories at Judge’s.”
The brand’s merchandise leans into the local network: online sales include a gift box with pecan-roasted bourbon coffee from Fairhope Coffee and “Campfire Bourbon” soap from Fairhope Soap Company, and Gibson supports community events with donations and sponsorships. More concepts are in development — pecan is the signature, but his product mind keeps moving.
In the end, his own description of the drink is as local as it gets: a “go-to” bourbon to take down to the bay and sip with good friends while the sun goes down. The old saloon had the goat. The new one has the pecan wood. Either way, the advice stands.