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so good they ought to bottle it

it's on the cover of a custom bike book lying upstairs on the top of my bookshelf. the one on the landing at the top of the stairs. the bike happens to be one of sacha white's vanillas, and appended to the stem and bars is a rather delicate bottle cage with one of those aluminium, cork stoppered water bottles. retro would be a particularly apt description. the word want figured highly on my wish-list when i visited the vanilla workshop in south-east portland in 2009. you can imagine my disappointment when sacha mentioned that the cage had been a one-off for his nahbs show bike and that fabrication had been a time-consuming process.

better not to ask if he'd make me one then.

when you consider where they've now placed the bottle cages on modern-day bicycles, you do rather have to wonder why the cages were ever moved from their front of stem position in the first place. surely it's a darned sight easier to grab a bottle in front of your nose than reach down midway up alpe d'huez. particularly in the days before combined brake and gear levers. and i'm not too proud to confess that i've never got the hang of grabbing a bottle from a seat-tube mounted cage. somehow that just seems plain wrong.

but irrespective where those bottles are sited on the bicycle's frame (i've seen several touring bikes with one fitted under the down tube; try reaching for that on an alpine descent), there can be no serious argument that they have changed considerably over the last century or so. though i am reliably assured that an entire workforce follows each and every professional peloton, clearing up the numerous bottles that have been insouciantly cast aside by the pelotonese in an attempt to lighten their load, it seems a tad incongruous and irresponsible to throw them away.

for though often cast as having green credentials, racing cyclists have contradictorily entered the realm of the disposable society. it might add a certain frisson to proceedings if able to reach for a discarded team bottle as a speeding bunch disappears down the road, but i figure just as many find their way into hidden corners of the countryside. that will probably never change. not content with plastering the team jerseys with advertisements, it's likely that the sponsors consider throw-away bottles as an adjunct to their advertising campaigns.

that, however, is not a feature that need concern the rest of us. aside from being force fed a constant stream of carbon fibre, each successive model seeking to redefine the word stiff, and despite none of us possessing the guns of steel to offer much resistance in the first place, we're all in danger of being moved further from eddy at each passing stage. though i'm sure it might take the form of a merry jape, i've never thrown my water bottle in the direction of roaming sheep at any time during my amateur career. and i find the idea of my bottle cage cossetting a stylish stainless steel bidon rather an attractive one.

you can, therefore, imagine my delight on discovering coloral.cc.

originating in steward street, birmingham (england, not alabama) in 1947, a post war industrial factory produced the first alloy drinking bottles and accompanying cages. these took the form of a fluted design with a cork stopper and sold for the princely sum of four shillings and sixpence. by the mid-fifties, foreign imports, the now ubiquitous plastic bottle and falling sales caused the closure of the factory after only seven years of glory.

in 2012, a group of enthusiasts carried out extensive historical and design research into the coloral company of old, resulting in an overwhelming need to revive the rather unique coloral bottle. times have moved on, however, and a couple of significant changes needed to be made; the size was altered to fit the modern-day bottle cage, and aluminium was discarded in favour of stainless steel to ensure continuing purity of the contents.

in a development that can only be described as serendipitous, the need to find a metalworking firm that could offer steel spinning, took them back to steward street, birmingham (still in england) where david and chris beeching were found to recreate the unique coloral water bottle. of course, even a short run of such a desirable item costs a bit more than a few hundred pounds. £75,000 to be precise; not the sort of loose change you find just lying around unattended.

thus our intrepid band of aficionados have harnessed the power of the interweb to bring them closer to reviving this iconic brand and its singularly excellent water bottle. if you are as enthralled by this project as i, head over to the coloral kickstarter page and pledge however much you can afford to help bring this cunning plan to fruition.

electronic shifting, hydraulic disc brakes, carbon nano tubes and endless wind-tunnel testing may be the face of contemporary cycling somewhere up near the cutting edge. but for those of us with no aspirations to reach or purchase that particular edge, there are factors of cycling ephemera that are just too important to be lost. the coloral bottle, along with toe clips, new old stock campagnolo hubs and cotton caps are firmly amongst those. do the right thing this very moment.

(and aside from that, they have one of the finest script logos i've seen in many a long day.)

coloral.cc | coloral kickstarter page

saturday 6th july 2013