ATCHISON, Kan. — The main still of the High Plains liquor company here was scraped together from junked parts of an old food processing plant. The tubing for the bottling equipment had been used to milk cows, and one of the tanks was actually an industrial vacuum cleaner.

The whole clanking operation, headquartered on a farm northwest of Kansas City, looks like a patchwork contraption out of the imagination. And that is basically what it was two years ago when Seth Fox, a cattle rancher down on his luck, decided to get a license to distill some vodka and a little whiskey.

“I talked to banks, told them I wanted to make vodka on my farm here, and they said, ‘Yeah, right you are,’” recalled Mr. Fox, whose company went on to become the first distillery in Kansas since Prohibition. “Well, I had a million dollars in sales last year.”

“I’m the seventh generation to be in alcohol,” he said proudly. “Just the first to do it legally.”

On the heels of the microbrewing boom, new microdistilleries are thriving from coast to coast. And some of the latest and quirkiest entrants to the industry are in places like Iowa, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Mr. Fox’s barn.