A review of our visit to Minglewood Distilling Co in downtown Wooster, Ohio — single barrel spirits made from 100% local Wayne County grain, housed in a rehabbed 1921 coal and ice plant along the railroad tracks.

We had this trip planned around a Jeep.

My son’s Jeep, specifically, which he’d agreed to let us take for the drive up to Wooster. Doors off, top off. The whole thing stripped down for what was shaping up to be a perfect day for it. Then I checked the forecast the night before and saw better than even odds of a storm rolling through while we were up there, and doors-off in a downpour isn’t a story, it’s a mistake, so we backed off and took my truck instead. Of course it never rained. Not a drop, the whole day. Should’ve trusted the Jeep and my gut instead of the weatherman.

The drive up from Newark doesn’t feel like Ohio, not really. Rolling hills, winding two-lanes, Amish buggies working the shoulder, farm stands selling baked goods along the way. More East Tennessee than Midwest, and it’s one of my favorite drives in the state for exactly that reason. We’d planned to stop at one of those stands on the way home and grab some whoopie pies, but by the time we rolled back through that evening, the ladies had already packed up shop for the day. Missed the Jeep. Missed the whoopie pies. Not our day for plans, apparently, but a good day regardless.

We’d never really spent time in Wooster before. Driven through it once, years ago, but never through the actual downtown, so we genuinely didn’t know what to expect. What we found surprised us. It was mid-morning on a Saturday and downtown Wooster was clean, busy, and occupied. Every storefront full, and not just with the bail bondsmen and law offices that tend to fill out a lot of small-town Ohio squares once the anchor businesses clear out. Restaurants, bars, boutiques, offices, a farmers market pulling a steady stream of foot traffic through the middle of it all. It’s an unusual thing to find in a small Ohio town, a downtown that’s genuinely thriving rather than hanging on. Later that afternoon, once the farmers market wrapped, a tequila and tacos festival took over roughly the same stretch under Wooster’s downtown DORA, which lets people wander around with a drink in hand from bar to bar. We weren’t there for that one. But it tells you something about the town that two separate daytime events could stack back to back on a Saturday and the streets could handle both of them without missing a beat.

Brunch, and a Bourbon Before Noon

Minglewood didn’t open for another hour, and we were hungry, so we parked the truck and set off to explore downtown on foot. We came across a small place called The Leaf — the sign out front promising breakfast, brunch, and lunch, with a short line already forming outside the door despite the early hour. Good enough sign as any, so we got in line.

We walked up to the hostess stand and were asked if we had a reservation. For brunch. At a small-town downtown cafe. I had to bite my tongue on that one, but if that’s the standard Wooster’s holding itself to on a random Saturday morning, the town’s doing just fine for itself. We didn’t have one, obviously, so they sat us at the bar instead, which turned out to be the better seat in the house anyway.

The bartender clocked my Bourbon Makes It Better hat before we’d even gotten settled and asked if I’d ever tried the Frank August Small Batch. I hadn’t, and I don’t think I’d finished saying so before she had it poured and sitting in front of me. The Leaf’s whiskey shelf isn’t going to blow away anybody who’s serious about the stuff, but the ladies working that bar are genuinely enthusiastic about it, and enthusiasm covers a lot of ground that a deep shelf can’t. We ordered brunch, specifically the cowboy bowl, eggs, sausage, fajita veggies, and potatoes, the whole thing smothered in a breakfast gravy that pulled it all together better than it had any right to. Good food, good people behind the bar, and a whiskey pour before noon that I wasn’t expecting when we walked in. Worth a stop if you’re ever downtown. I’ve got a full review of that Frank August pour up on the site if you want the details on it.

We finished up around 12:30 and headed back to the truck to go find Minglewood.

A Building With a Past

It was maybe two minutes away, tucked right along the railroad tracks in a building that used to be the Minglewood Coal and Ice Company. The company itself dates back further than the building does. Owner Andy Morrison told me the business got its start in 1880 with the purchase of a coal mine near North Lawrence, and the three-story Ice Plant building the distillery now calls home wasn’t built until 1921. Minglewood Coal and Ice ran until 1955, when it went bankrupt, and the building sat there afterward the way a lot of small towns end up with an old industrial husk they just learn to live around. Somewhere along the way, Andy and his father Mark looked at that building and saw a distillery instead of a teardown.

It wasn’t the original plan, as it turns out. Andy and Mark bought the property first intending to renovate it and lease it out. They were already hobby distilling on the side, and somewhere in the middle of the renovation, the idea started to take shape that the building itself would make a great home for a real distillery. There weren’t many others in Ohio at the time, so they figured it was worth a shot. Minglewood was founded in 2015, though it took a couple more years of work before they actually opened to the public in 2017.

We walked the outside of the place for a minute before going in, just taking it in. It’s clearly industrial. Clearly old. Brick and steel and the kind of proportions buildings only got built in when the point was function, not curb appeal. But it doesn’t look its age, and I mean that as a real compliment. A building pushing a hundred years old shouldn’t look this clean, this cared for. It mattered to Andy and Mark to preserve the building’s history while still meeting the standards of a modern distillery, so most of the original structure is still intact. When they cleaned the place out, they pulled any cork insulation and mortar that had come loose, but left anything still solid on the walls. They also held onto some of the original cooling pipes from the old Ice Plant, which now hang mounted over the bar, a nice detail that ties the building’s past directly to what’s happening in it now.

Inside, it’s about what you’d hope for walking into a well-run tasting room. A rack of merchandise and bottles greets you right off the entrance, the bar sits beyond that, and a generous seating area opens up to the left with tables and stools for working through a flight at your own pace. Abbey and Erika were behind the bar when we walked in, and the greeting was warm and genuine right off the bat, the kind that tells you they’re actually glad to see customers come through the door on a Saturday afternoon, not just running through the motions of a job.

Building the Flight

I mentioned The Pourch and told them I was there to write about the visit. I wasn’t fishing for anything free, and I want to be clear about that, but I do think it’s the right move to be upfront with people about why you’re taking photos and scribbling notes at their bar. Nobody likes finding out after the fact.

From there we got into the whiskey. Abbey pulled out a card listing the full lineup and walked me through how the flight worked, five pours for a set price. Minglewood’s catalog runs wider than you might expect for a distillery this size. Gin, vodka, a handful of flavored whiskeys rounding things out. But I already had a bottle of their standard bourbon sitting at home, so I built my flight around five of their more traditional offerings instead: the Wheated Bottled in Bond bourbon, the Bottled in Bond Rye, the Bottled in Bond Wheat Whiskey, the Double Oak Bourbon, and their 8.5-year 250th Anniversary Bourbon, a cask-strength special release marking America’s 250th, not the distillery’s own. Minglewood’s only been at this since 2015, so that milestone belongs to the country, not the company.

I’ve got full reviews written up on each of those pours linked above, so I’ll let those do the heavy lifting on tasting notes rather than repeat myself here. Short version: I enjoyed every single one of them, including the rye, and rye whiskey doesn’t usually win me over. That’s not a small thing coming from me.

My wife wasn’t drinking flights, she’d found something on the cocktail menu built around pineapple, and whatever it was, she never stopped talking about it the rest of the day. By the time we were back in the truck she still couldn’t tell me the name of it, just that she wanted another one. Take that as its own small endorsement of the cocktail program.

Single Barrel, No Malted Barley, All Local

What’s more interesting than any one pour, though, is what Minglewood is doing across the board. Everything they bottle is single barrel. No batching, no blending multiple barrels together to smooth out the edges and chase consistency the way most of the industry does. Spirit goes from barrel straight to bottle with only water added to bring the proof down to where they want it, and even that step gets skipped on the 250th Anniversary release, which is cask strength exactly as it came out of the barrel.

There’s a real philosophy behind that choice, not just a stylistic one. Andy pointed out something worth sitting with: a lot of “craft” distilleries these days are sourcing spirits from somewhere else and just putting their own label on the bottle. Bottling everything as Bottled in Bond is Minglewood’s way of proving what’s inside is genuinely theirs, grain to bottle, with nothing borrowed along the way.

Minglewood is also the only distillery currently operating in Wayne County, though that may not stay true forever, a new operation is reportedly getting started in nearby Dalton, still in its early stages as of this writing.

None of Minglewood’s mashbills use malted barley. That’s the kind of detail that’ll fly right past a casual drinker, but it’s a genuinely unusual choice for a craft operation, and it isn’t stubbornness on Minglewood’s part. It’s geography. Every grain they use comes from Wayne County, and Andy and Mark have stuck with the same two farms since day one: corn comes from Frycrest Farm in Apple Creek, and rye and wheat come from Woodlyn Acres Farms in Dalton. Barley does grow in the county, but it’s planted almost exclusively as a cover crop, meant to protect and enrich the soil between real plantings rather than get harvested for grain, and it never gets allowed to go to seed. So there’s simply no local malted barley to be had, and Minglewood builds their mashbills around what the county actually produces instead. Judging by what was in my glass, that limitation hasn’t cost them a thing.

Here’s a detail that stuck with me more than almost anything else from the visit, and one I got a little wrong when I first wrote it up. I’d understood that Mark built the still and fermenters from scratch, but the real story is even better. Before Minglewood, Mark ran a custom welding business, mostly structural work, stairs, railings, that kind of thing, along with a wide variety of jobs for the manufacturers around Wooster. When it came time to equip the distillery, he didn’t build from a blank sheet of metal, he repurposed. The still started life as a chemical reactor tank. The mash tun used to be a cooking tank in a salsa factory. The fermenters came out of an old research experiment at OARDC, the Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center. Converting it all into a working distillery took Mark somewhere in the range of four to six months. Most craft distilleries are buying their equipment from the same handful of fabricators everybody else in the industry uses. Minglewood’s setup is a genuinely resourceful one-of-one, repurposed by a welder who knew exactly what he was doing before he ever called himself a distiller.

Meet Andy and Mark

Abbey and Erika told us the distillery kept its name straight from the old Minglewood Coal and Ice Company sign out front. Andy Morrison, who goes by Owner rather than any fancier title, runs the place alongside his father, Mark. Andy happened to be on site the day we visited, and after we’d spent a while at the bar working through the flight, Abbey and Erika slipped off and came back with him in tow. He offered to give us what he called the “nickel tour.”

It’s just Andy and Mark running the whole show, stills and bottling both, working in 500-gallon batches, and they only actually distill from November through April. The rest of the year goes to everything else that keeps a small distillery running: barrel management, bottling, tours, the bar, the events calendar.

The rickhouse itself runs three stories, climate-controlled with steam heat. I’d originally understood that Andy and Mark rotate barrels through the space to even out aging differences, but Andy corrected me on that when I followed up, and the real answer is more interesting. He’s found that two barrels aged side by side vary more from each other than barrels aged on different floors, and he thinks the rickhouse’s grate floors and overall layout mostly cancel out the usual floor-to-floor differences you’d expect elsewhere. What has changed things, and what Andy credits to the building’s paver brick walls, is that proof climbs significantly as the barrels age. At six years old, Minglewood’s whiskey is coming in at cask strengths around 128 to 130 proof. Barrel entry proof for their bourbons and ryes is always 120, and most of the whiskey goes into number 4 charred barrels.

When it’s time to bottle, Andy pulls three or four barrels from the same season, samples each one, and tastes them side by side before choosing his favorite to bottle. He says the proofs stay fairly consistent within a given season, which makes the side-by-side tasting more about flavor than chasing a number.

The Barrels People Sign Their Name To

A handful of the barrels up in that rickhouse were covered in signatures, dozens of names scrawled across the heads in marker and paint pen, and we asked Andy about it, because it wasn’t something we’d seen before at another distillery.

Turns out Minglewood runs an annual Bourbon Barrel Signing Celebration, and it was Mark’s idea from the start, a way to bring people into the distillery during what’s normally a slow stretch of the year in January and February. It’s free to join. You show up, pick out a barrel from what’s currently aging, sign your name on it, and from that point forward you’re invited back every year to taste how that specific barrel is coming along. The group of people who signed on to a given barrel gets together and votes each year on whether it’s ready to be bottled or whether it deserves another year in the rickhouse. Once the group finally decides it’s ready, everyone who signed gets first crack at buying a bottle before it ever reaches the general public. This year, nearly a thousand guests came out to sign the barrel.

It’s a genuinely smart idea, and not in a cynical marketing sense. It gives people an actual reason to come back to Wooster year after year, a stake in something bigger than a single visit, and it turns strangers into a loose little community built around one barrel of whiskey they all decided to bet on together. I’ve seen plenty of distilleries try to manufacture that kind of return-visit hook. This is one of the few times I’ve seen it actually work the way it’s supposed to, and at nearly a thousand signatures a year, it clearly works for Minglewood too.

The Ice Plant

Beyond the tasting room, Andy walked us out to the patio and through the Ice Plant, Minglewood’s event space built into another section of the old building. It’s a mid-sized room, capacity somewhere north of a hundred people, and it’s deliberately set up as a blank canvas rather than a themed space, ready to be dressed up for whatever the booking calls for. Weddings, corporate events, live music, private parties. The patio sits right alongside it, and from the layout it looks like the kind of setup that could open up between the two spaces when the weather cooperates, though I didn’t get a close enough look to say for certain.

They’d hosted a Grateful Dead cover band the night before we visited, and by all accounts it drew a solid crowd and a good time was had. Between that and the wedding bookings Andy mentioned, it’s clear the Ice Plant has become just as much a part of Minglewood’s identity at this point as the whiskey itself. A distillery that also happens to be one of the more interesting event venues in Wayne County isn’t a bad thing to be.

Who Minglewood Is For

Minglewood isn’t really a family stop, and it’s probably not the first place a dedicated bottle collector chases down unless they’re specifically hunting craft single barrels, which, to be fair, plenty of people are these days. But for just about everyone else, it’s an easy yes. Young professionals will like the space and the atmosphere. Cocktail people have a genuinely deep menu to work through behind that bar. Anybody who’s serious about craft bourbon or rye will find plenty here worth taking seriously, single barrel, no malted barley, local grain start to finish. And casual visitors just exploring downtown Wooster for the first time, the way we were, should absolutely make time to walk over and check it out. It’s an easy stop whether you’re building a whole day around it or just passing through on your way to somewhere else.

Worth the Drive

Minglewood works because it doesn’t try to hide what it is or dress itself up as something bigger than it’s actually pulling off. A hundred year old coal and ice building doing exactly what a good rehab is supposed to do, honoring the bones of the place while turning it into something entirely new. Single barrel whiskey made from grain grown down the road at two farms they’ve used since day one. A father and son running the whole thing by hand, distilling in equipment Mark repurposed himself, a salsa factory’s cooking tank and a chemical reactor tank among them, before either of them had any business calling themselves distillers. A barrel signing tradition that turns a single visit into a standing invitation to come back year after year, one that nearly a thousand people took Andy and Mark up on this past year alone. Keep an eye out, too, for their Honey Barrel Aged Bourbon, a once-a-year special release that only fills one barrel and tends to sell out fast. Add in a downtown that’s genuinely worth walking around on its own merits, and Wooster earned its way onto our short list of places we’ll drive back to.

We missed the Jeep ride. We missed the whoopie pies. We didn’t miss Minglewood, and neither should you.

Plan Your Visit

Minglewood Distilling Co & The Ice Plant 437 E South St, Wooster, OH 44691 (330) 601-1600 minglewooddistilling.com

Hours: Friday: 4:00 PM – 8:00 PM Saturday: 12:00 PM – 8:00 PM

For more on Minglewood, check out their listing in our distillery directory.