GOING WITH THE GRAIN: Asheville's Riverbend Malt House connects the state's farmers and brewers.

• Author: Keller, Des

Founders Brent Manning and Brian Simpson started their Asheville-based business, Riverbend Malt House, in 2011 on a simple premise--that the exploding regional craft LI beer industry touted a local product but sourced a key ingredient, malted grain, from thousands of miles away.

"Asheville is all about local food, so why wouldn't they be about local malt," says Manning, who moved from the Wilmington area in 2009 about the same time as Simpson. The two had been co-workers for years, handling environmental assessments for a consulting firm. They view themselves as "sustainability geeks" who love the outdoors, great beer, and working for themselves.

"When we approached breweries," says Manning, "a lot of them were like 'Nope, we make German-style beer, so we buy German malt, or we make English beer using English malt.'" The pair also discovered they were up against an entrenched notion among craft brewers that quality malted grain came from outside the Southeast.

Beer has four primary ingredients: malted grain (mostly barley), hops, water, and yeast. While hops are difficult to grow in the hot, humid Southeast, grains such as barley, wheat, rye, oats, and wheat are quite suitable. Simpson found out via a grain specialist with North Carolina State University that none of the region's grain was being malted for use in Asheville's breweries.

"I thought well, we'll just malt grain for breweries," says Simpson, a hydrogeologist by profession. "I was super naive."

So began a couple of years of experimentation and market exploration before opening the doors of Riverbend in a 2.000-square-foot, former produce-storage facility in West Asheville near the Western N.C. Farmers Market. The first germination room for the grain had been the site's "banana room."

Hold on a minute. Why didn't the beer lovers Simpson and Manning just start a brewery instead?

"We loved the beer industry, but we didn't want to be just another brewery in the city," laughs Manning, a home brewer himself. Asheville had 13 breweries when Riverbend opened 12 years ago. Now it has 40. Craft malting is a $2 billion annual business in the U.S., yet only 1% of grains could be considered "craft malt."

"That's a sizable market with potential," says Scott Hickman, a veteran tech executive hired as Riverbend's CEO in 2016. "One to two billion dollars' worth of malt consumed by the craft beer industry are numbers that get investors' attention."

The malt company's success mirrors the ascent of...