Abstract Recent years have seen significant progress in the generation and application of twisted beams carrying orbital angular momentum. Here we study the elastic scattering of twisted Bessel light from a crystal and compare our predictions with the results for incident plane-wave radiation. Based on form-factor approximation our numerical calculations of the differential scattering cross sections have been carried out for a crystal of lithium at x-ray energies. It is shown that the use of twisted light can lead to a measurable change in the scattering cross section for the nanocrystals approaching a few nm in size.