Chris King Open House Part 2: Matte Bourbon Pre-Order

When Chris King's Matte Bourbon was announced, we hoped that it would be a less-limited edition run, but as we hear more, it's sounding like it won't last, so it's probably best if you get you pre-order the parts you want to ensure that you're able to get them.

You can pre-order headsets here.

You can pre-order bottom brackets here.

You can pre-order hubs here.

In light of this limited availability, this week we wanted to look a bit more closely at a few more bikes from the 2019 Chris King Open House that used this color.

THE BIKES

Caletti Ti Gravel

One of the most common (for good reason) colors that we saw combined with matte bourbon was some form of blue.  Caletti Cycles added some really nice touches to that basic scheme though by adding white stripes and a few areas of a deep red.  Really classy bike, and it was the first one that convinced us that the new color would work well with blue.

We love seeing the classic lines of Jeremy Sycip's bikes: his wishbone seatstay arrangement that recalls the look of a segmented fork, and the pennies he uses to cap the tubes are just plain cool.  We really like his take on the possibilities of matte bourbon with this mountain bike in a shade of turquoise complete with match painted and anodized Sycip stem.

 Victoire Made to Measure

One of the recurring themes that we kept coming back to at the Open House was how various builders could use a similar idea–blue paint, gravel bike, unpainted rear-end, for instance–and come up with very different bikes.  Victoire's offering was a perfect example of this.  Without seeing this one and the Caletti we mentioned earlier, you could say that they were pretty similar because they had all of the characteristics listed above, but in person they were unique: while Caletti's bike was made of titanium, the Victoire was a mixture of Columbus Life and XCr tubing.  This combination isn't something you see often because XCr is stainless, and Life is not.  If you take a close look at the visible fillets on this bike, you'll notice they're not the usual brass color, and that's because they contain silver in order to make brazing stainless possible.  Another major difference is this bike's inclusion of luggage capacity and dropper post, making it much more of what we'll call an 'enduro allroad bike'.  Overall a very beautiful bicycle with lots of nice details.

We'll have more highlights from the Open House in the coming weeks, but for now we just wanted to make it clear that it's sounding like matte bourbon won't be with us for long, so if you want some, you might want to pre-orderit!