Our Story

01 · The bet

Every ride ends at a café anyway

John and Rich are Devon-born, lifelong riders, and yes, actual brothers. We've been riding together for well over a decade: hybrids loaded with camping kit, then road bikes, then gravel bikes, then whatever gets us furthest from a main road. Every proper ride we've done in all that time, road, gravel, doesn't matter, has ended the same way: propped bikes, a table outside, and a coffee that somehow tastes better than it has any right to. We talked for years about turning that habit into something real. Cycle Bros is that conversation, finally out of the group chat.

We're not trying to be a lifestyle brand for people who own a bike. We're trying to make the coffee we already wanted after the climb, the one that goes with a jersey pocket and a Strava upload, for the tribe of riders who get the jokes and know exactly what a bonk feels like. We just bloody love riding bikes, and this is the most useful thing we could think of to do about it.

02 · What makes it cycling coffee

Named after the sport, not the beans

Every bag we've ever put out is named for something every cyclist has lived through: the bonk, the crown you'll lose by Tuesday and won't stop talking about, the work a domestique does that nobody claps for. That's the well we draw from, not a random name generator. Most of it we've lived through ourselves, usually miles from the nearest café. The labels are limited edition: the art changes every season, so the bags for sale right now are a snapshot, not a catalogue. The coffee inside isn't limited, it's the labels that come and go. Labels that have been and gone still get their own page here rather than quietly disappearing.

See the current lineup →

03 · Where it actually comes from

Devon brand, Yorkshire roast

We don't roast the coffee ourselves, and we'd rather say so than pretend otherwise. The coffee is from Limini Coffee, a brilliant family-run specialty roastery in West Yorkshire, who roast every bag to order from green beans bought through transparent, traceable supply chains, with growers paid well above commodity price. The coffee is all theirs. What we add is everything on the outside: we pick the blends we love to drink, put them through their paces on every loaded ride, then dress them in our labels, our names and our daft cycling jokes. On top of that, 1% of every order goes to carbon removal through Stripe Climate, because a small operation is still an operation.

04 · Home roads

Devon first, then wherever the roads lead

Devon is where we actually ride, and where we always have: Dartmoor climbs, coast lanes, the café stops that make the whole thing worthwhile. Over the years the habit has dragged us further afield too, bikepacking across Wiltshire and the length of Spain, but it's the home roads we keep coming back to. We're building a directory of the cafés that treat cyclists right, starting on those roads and spreading out across the South West as we find more places worth the detour.

Browse the café stops →  ·  Join a group ride →  ·  Read the Journal →

05 · Where it started

Ten years of photos, and plenty of miles before them

The oldest pictures we could dig out are from the summer of 2016: a few days touring Devon on flat-bar hybrids, camping kit strapped on wherever it would fit, from the Granite Way on the edge of Dartmoor out to the North Devon coast. The bikes have got better since. The hair got shorter, then left completely for John! The stops haven't changed one bit, and neither has the fact that there's nobody we'd rather ride with.