Back Roads

Matt Aspengren is the Master Distiller at the Little Round Still on Jefferson Ave. in downtown Wadena, Minn. Aspengren — who distills rum, vodka, whiskey, and bourbon in small batches for the distillery — listens to the customers who visit the tasting room.

Take Rhuberry vodka, for example. Aspengren admits he doesn’t particularly favor vodka; and if it had been up to him he might have added another rum to the distilleries line of White Rum, Crooked Dock spiced rum, or the Oakie Dokie rum flavored by Minnesota grown charred white oak chips.

Instead, he made a small batch of vodka infused with rhubarb grown on a nearby farm and offered it to his customers. They liked it; and a couple celebrating their 60th wedding anniversary at the distillery chose the name.

“It’s now one of our best sellers,” said Aspengren, who points out Little Round Still’s products are now in over 200 liquor stores.

The Little Round Still is a large two-story repurposed JC Penny retail store. The still itself is made up of a half dozen gleaming copper sills and a series of former dairy farm stainless steel bulk tanks for cooking the mash. This bright, well-lit space is enclosed by glass and faces the Mural Room, a large seating area with tables for pizza or

food from the occasional food truck which sets up shop on weekends when there is live music. Visitors can also play pool, competitive darts, or try an arcade game. The mural, rescued from a grocery store, is on the wall opposite the actual distillery. It is a massive floor-to-ceiling painting portraying the history of Wadena in the faces of its residents. There are hundreds of faces.

“People come in here to see if they can find themselves in the mural,” Cristilyn Hutterer, one of the distillery’s business partners, said. “You can get lost looking at all the faces.”

The Mural room is paneled with large sheets of burnished but gently rusted steel. The Little Round Still likes to repurpose things which may have been headed for the scrap heap. The steel was headed for an auto factory when it fell off a truck. Nobody wanted it as it lay around rusting, so Cristilyn and her partners put it to good use. Beyond the Mural Room is the tasting room and a small bar. For all its classy décor, the key to the Still’s success is quality. “The big distilleries cut corners for mass production,” Matt says. “We don’t.” v