New Riff Maltster Bourbon With Crystal Malt and Malted Rye

Several of us at New Riff have a background in craft brewing, most especially our Master Distiller Brian Sprance who brewed for many years in Greater Cincinnati’s top craft breweries. These days, Brian puts his creativity and deep knowledge of brewing grains into New Riff, and you, dear Bourbon lover, are the better for it! Brian was intrigued by a malted barley offered by Simpson’s, one of the UK’s leading maltsters. It’s called T50™ Crystal Malt, and is gently toasted and roasted to a tawny, golden hue. As typically used in pale ales and bitters, crystal malt lends delicate toasty-toffee notes as well as color and head retention. What would it do in a high rye Bourbon? Many of those same honeyed, husky, toasty notes are conveyed into the whiskey, but the other small grain here is malted rye. As we have learned from New Riff 100% Malted Rye whiskey, that grain supplies spicy rye flavors with an ineffably lovely, delicate delivery. The elegance of malted rye makes room for the husky, toasty, cocoa nib notes of T50™ crystal to express as well. Hence, the secret to our Maltster T50™ is that two exceptional malts are at play: the toasted crystal malt and the malted rye play off each other in seamless fashion, a twirling dance of gentle rye spice and molten toffee that add up to, really, an exceptionally complex Bourbon whiskey.