Bike Check: Sour Bikes ‘Pasta Party’

Jürgen from Sour Bikes talked us through the features of this ‘Pasta Party’ bike from Sour Bikes, a German brand that’s managed to make production in Germany work for them.

Unique content like this takes time to create, and would normally be paywalled. But we’d like to support the independent builders and makers behind these bikes, and Bespoked. So you’re getting to read this for free. If you enjoy it, please consider joining us, and supporting what we do.

What is this bike called, first of all?

The Pasta Party!

The Pasta Party? Okay… and what is the Pasta Party for?

The Pasta Party is a cross-country hardtail. Of all the bikes that we make, it’s the most like a purebred cross-country bike. We see a lot of people going from local cross-country races or local lunch laps up to even a number of our sponsored athletes doing ultra-distance bikepacking and that sort of shenanigans.

What’s this bike made from and how is it made?

It’s made from steel. So it’s made from multi-butted, heat-treated, custom-drawn tubing that we import and then we process and make by hand in our own little factory workshop in Dresden. It’s all serial production. We do custom colours. Something like 95% of the bikes that we sell are custom colours, custom powder coated, but then the geometry itself, the sizing itself is a serial production.

Do you make your own dropouts as well?

We do. All of the parts you see on this bike, they’re made in Taiwan because that’s where we can get the small volume and pricing that we need. Some special parts for prototypes are made in Germany in small batches, but that’s a totally different thing.

But they’re all our own designs. The dropouts, the derailleur hanger, the bottom bracket, integrated seat post clamp and head tube, that’s all us.

Tell us about the head tube, it’s very interesting.

Yeah, so it’s a EC34/EC44 head tube – so a tapered head tube – but it’s got an external taper on it, I guess you could call it, and it’s a strength and weight thing. Chris, the owner and designer, is perpetually designing and redesigning current bikes and new bikes and kind of stumbled on this design in his wild fever dream of redesigning things and was able to get more strength at less weight out of this design. And it also just produces a unique design that looks interesting. Instead of just a straight EC44 head tube, which has nothing wrong with that, this one just looks a little bit… yeah… weird.

Looks like that has inserts in the bottom bracket?

Yep, so this one’s an EBB, an eccentric bottom bracket. Again, our own design, but a design that lends from many other designs. The EBB is something that’s really well thought out and well tested at this point. Because we like single speed – a few of us at Sour ride these bikes single speed – and we really wanted to have that capability, not only for people that want to wreck their knees riding single speed mountain bikes, but also for the bikepacking flavour of this. If you do ever get into that situation somewhere in the desert then it’s sort of make it or break it, and you need to single speed your bike to get out, it gives you just a little bit more leeway.

Additionally, with this bike with 120mm fork, you can get pretty radical on it. That EBB allows people to kind of tune it to more ‘cross country I’m going to go real fast’ mode or drop the bottom bracket or position it to more trail oriented riding. Or, even just bike fitting, it changes the effective geometry of the bike.

Why did you choose flat mount brakes?

Yeah, that’s a touchy subject! It’s weight and aesthetics is what it is. And we kind of did the thing where we looked at all the brands offering flat mount brakes and a lot of our favourite brands – Magura, Hope, Shimano – they all offer flat mount. And by doing that, we can have the geometry of the rear end of the bike exactly where we want it and how we want it, we can add rack mounts and that sort of stuff. Being the German market, we do see a lot of people build these bikes up for like an uber-commuter type situation: big tyres, fenders, etc, with a rack, and that flat mount just allows us that flexibility to really design that rear end to fit the use case and just look real good.

Can you opt for rack mounts and other types of things welded on?

Yeah, because we have all of our own production in house because we do it ourselves. We add all sorts of things. A really popular addition to this bike specifically is a third bolt on the bottle cage for any sort of cargo mount thing. The bento box bolts on the top just behind the stem to add any sort of top tube mount. We’ve actually secretly quietly added Rohloff mounting to this bike, which is just two extra braze-ons on this bike that you really wouldn’t even notice if I didn’t say it, which allows the flexibility of an internally geared hub. And all of our dropouts have integrated M5 bolts for a standard rear rack.

And then some people take that to the next step and also add the ones up top for like a heavy duty rear rack. So the options are there. We’ve added special things as well like one time we added like a bolt for if someone who wanted to add a talisman. So the possibilities are there.

And so is it those kind of finishing touches that are custom or is there custom geometry available as well?

There’s no custom geometry available. The custom begins and ends at color and little bits. We are hand built. We are handmade in Germany. We’re doing it. You know, it’s Steve and Thomas, like there’s no smoke and mirrors there, but we don’t produce custom geo frames. They are production.

So do you have frames in stock?

When we have the time, yes. The demand is high, the supply is low! And we are generally full tilt.

What’s the lead time on a frame?

It varies on size and model. You know, the mediums and larges of the Pasta Party like this and the Purple Haze, our big gravel bike, those are extraordinarily popular. So the lead time can get up to 90 days. And some of the other models that may be a little less popular or sizes on the fringes can go down all the way to two weeks.

And do you know what this color is called?

I do. It’s ‘rose burgundy’.

Oh, I was hoping for something more exciting than that to go with ‘Pasta Party’! How much does this frame retail for?

1099 Euros. Every year we do two standard colours and we choose that half via Instagram, half via dealers. It’s sort of like of all the colours we did in the past year, there have been one or two colours like, ‘whoa, that color is dope!’. This is one of them. So those standard colours are free. But like I said, pretty much 90 percent of the frames we sell, people choose a custom colour of which there are more than 6,500 options.

Oh, that’s a lot of choice! Is there anything else you’d like to tell us about this bike that I haven’t asked you about?

No, I think that’s kind of covered all the custom frame bits that we spend an exorbitant amount of time on! And just, like the customising of a base production model – we’re super proud of being ‘production’. Obviously, we’re at a handmade bike show and the custom frames that are surrounding us are absolutely fantastic. It’s my favourite part of the bike world. But it was an extraordinarily difficult process to begin to step towards the production quality and quotas of Taiwan in Europe, and we’re super proud of how far we’ve come.

Yeah. Many have tried. So well done!

Thank you.

Unique content like this takes time to create, and would normally be paywalled. But we’d like to support the independent builders and makers behind these bikes, and Bespoked. So you’re getting to read this for free. If you enjoy it, please consider joining us, and supporting what we do.

https://singletrackworld.com/2024/07/interview-ted-james-designs/

---