Review: Brother Cycles Big Bro – For long and short adventures

There’s something very exciting about getting a new adventure bike out of the box for the first time. With a trail bike, you kind of know what you’re going to get, with most models following a well tried and tested formula of frame, wheels of a certain size and forks and a groupset you’ve probably ridden on before. But when the package comes from a small British manufacturer, with their own take on adventure mountain biking and by definition, the kind of bike that is needed to tackle it, to totally misquote that famous US philosopher, Forest Gump: “bikes are like a box of chocolates: you never know what you’re gonna get.” So, to say I was impatient to get into the box the Big Bro came in would be a definite understatement. It would actually be closer to the truth to say I had to use all the willpower I could muster to resist cutting the poor thing out of its cardboard shell! And as it slowly emerged from the various packaging materials draped all over it, the excitement only intensified. The pink paint (they call it Raspberry) grabbed me immediately – this was a bike I wanted to be seen on. Once totally hatched, I could only marvel at its simplicity. It somehow managed to look 100% modern yet, at the same time, like everything mountain bikes were when I started riding, far too many years ago. OK, you don’t really have to look very hard to see how...

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