Riverbend Malt House releases Crystal 80, darkest Crystal malt yet

Riverbend Malt House has given recipe builders a new way to build darkness without jumping straight to roasted grain. Crystal 80, announced April 14 and now available for purchase, is the darkest malt in Riverbend’s Crystal family and the darkest malt in its portfolio, with an SRM range of 70 to 90 and flavor notes of dark cherry, baker’s chocolate, coffee cake and oak.

That matters because Crystal 80 is not being positioned as a blunt-color shortcut. Riverbend says it was developed after years of research and development and produced with a proprietary kilning technique that mimics the stages of a standard roasting profile without intense heat. The company’s pitch is a truly crystallized malt that gives brewers deep color and layered sweetness with more nuance than a simple move toward black malt territory. For English Mild and Barleywine, Riverbend says the malt can add the kind of color and complexity that changes the shape of the whole grist.

The family comparison makes the new malt easier to place in a recipe. Crystal 50 sits at 45 to 55 SRM and brings toffee, coffee and dark chocolate. Crystal 20 runs from 15 to 25 SRM and leans lighter, with caramel, toffee, pumpernickel and black tea. Read together, the three malts work like a ladder, with each step adding more color and darker flavor cues without forcing a brewer to swap in a completely different roast character. That gives a brewer designing an English Mild, brown ale or strong dark ale a more precise dial for sweetness and depth.

Riverbend’s background helps explain why this release lands with so much weight. The Asheville, North Carolina-based maltster was founded in 2010 by Brent Manning and Brian Simpson and says it was the first craft malt house east of the Mississippi River. In its 2025 year in review, the company said it sold malt to more than 300 breweries and distilleries and sourced grain from family-owned farms in North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Florida and Virginia, all within 500 miles of the malt house.

Crystal 80 extends that model into the darkest corner of the Crystal lineup, where color, flavor and origin story all matter at once. For brewers looking to tune a grist with more control, it adds a new commercial option for building deep amber to brown beers with a darker, more articulate malt backbone.