My first introduction to Handlebar Coffee, in fact California itself was an unplanned stop off. But it wasn’t the first time the name of this cyclists’ coffee had flashed across my radar. That was when my wife Sarah stumbled across them in a lifestyle magazine back in the days we lived in the UK, which sparked a bit of internet wanderlust around a state that had history for her, and my family but not yet me. I didn’t make the connection until I stood outside and smelled the coffee with a dear friend Jeff – my local host/ riding partner and caffienator that had decided to fuel us up before heading north to ride up the UCI stamped Gibraltar Road climb (from which the house blend takes it’s name) with a bit of local gravel mixed in on the way back and broaden my fledgeling Californian knowledge as much as possible in my short time here. This was where my bikes were built to live but they were thousands of miles away across the pond, missing out.
As I’ve long thought – to those of a certain age – namely old, gravel riding seems pretty much like mountain biking before ‘the comfort years’. Road bike geometry ridden off road on amber walled tyres without enough knobbles and handlebars that are too narrow. Thankfully at least the brakes and even gears now, don’t compare with their 1987 forefathers. On the whole there seems to be a simple joy of riding in analogue hardship without comfortable, stable geometry and flatten anything suspension that’s been long forgotten. It could be seen as emperor’s new clothes marketing of something already owned gathering dust in the back of folks’ garages, but I wonder if gravel riding’s true gift to contemporary cycling is more cultural than anything. It strikes me that all the pomp and newness of gravel riding aside, there’s one interesting aspect to this new discipline of old that’s often overlooked, and that’s simply the creation of a common language to bridge the gap between cycling tribes.
There were always multi discipline cycling households that could have a Pinarello and a Fat Chance cohabit the garage but on the whole you fell into one of two camps historically. Road cycling rarely related to it’s mountain biking siblings and vice versa. Then despite cyclocross already being a cold wet and muddy natural half way house, gravel bikes emerged taking speed and gravity and risk down a notch from where mountain biking had found itself and bike handling, technique and freedom up a notch from where road cycling was forced to stay – on urban tarmac. Suddenly gravel became a common language that meant road cyclists could experience clipless shoes that one could actually walk in, and mountain bikers could discover steady, easy get home speed on the last leg of a ride back from the woods on the road rather than the painful slog of old against the wind on big slow tyres. And it was this joining of the waves and coffee tables that dawned on me at Handlebar Coffee in Santa Barbara, CA.
Introduced to Handlebar Coffee Roasters Aaron Olsen and Kim Anderson I was left to a holy trinity of caffeine, cake and picture editing while Jeff had to go to his studio across town to carry on his prime job as a trendy local photographer instead of his temporary role as host and guide.
What struck me immediately was that this coffee shop with a drop handlebar logo that roasted it’s own beans wasn’t purely appealing to cyclists. And the cyclists it did invariably draw in weren’t from the traditional coffee shop discipline – the road. The emergence and subsequent boom we’ve seen in recent years of niche coffee shops, from tables playing board games while sipping, to inner city bike couriers mid-delivery and the Prada roadie set heading out for a hundred on the pedals, seems to have put a clear boundary between the different tribes of cycling. Where as a decade or so ago mountain bikers and roadies would grab a cup of tea from any polystyrene cup they could at a greasy spoon before and after their worship, now their ritual is supported by specific chapels built for these knights of ni-che and as mountain biking has become more truck and trail-centre centric their paths and cups cross less. But not so it seemed here at this handlebar.
Sitting with a computer putting together visual stories of a previous two weeks that ranged from skinny tyres in the Arizona desert to fatter ones in the snow capped Colorado Rockies and a road movie in between seen from a passenger seat road trip, lasted about half an hour before the real life stories of transient coffee dwellers migrated through the tables around me and took precedence of my focus, attention and then pencil. I’m definitely a believer in ‘the every day can be as interesting as the blockbuster story’ and this was a people watcher’s paradise. Differing points of view and tear sheets people’s everyday were projected together like snippets of parallel lives flashed across the screen in front of me then closed as they left, leaving the pages of their story to unfold one blip-vert at a time to their own passers by for the next couple of hours, likely to have ten alternative endings to each story recorded by the time they reached home like Chinese whispers.
I met interesting people too that day I spent in a cafe. People that even became my friends. There was the woman that knew the same town squares I remember fondly from childhood summers spent in Tuscany. The Man that worked with some of Hollywood’s greats and had produced a TV show he flattered me by assuming I was too young to know – The Brady Bunch. And then there were the cyclists. Many many cyclists. Given the owners were former road racers, despite my initial impression of inclusiveness I had imagined that particular tribe being the majority gathered, but out back where seating could accommodate bicycles, there were all denominations of the two wheeled. Mostly affluent ones being California but neat lines of Italian road bikes rested opposite piles of freshly dusted trail bikes awaiting a pick up truck to ride home in slung over the tailgate, and then that intermediary – the gravel bike. ‘All tribes welcome’ could have been the tagline under the Handlebar branding but I suppose the need for speed along with that for caffeine is a shared mantra of cycling’s various groups. And this is the home of mountain biking after all. The long sock brigade are the new money of posh cycling round here where names like Ringle and Grafton still have solid (or drilled lighter) cache. Sadly I didn’t see any Slingshots or Yeti C26s pull up for a cuppa but I imagined if there were any still holding together out on these hills they’d likely be by in time. And be welcomed.
Obviously being a cafe with a genuine pro-cycling bloodline tipped the cycling punter scale somewhat but it is interesting to me that while there were once destination shops for cyclists to flock to, drool at and leave with a trinket from the shiny things cabinet or perhaps a friend to ride with in future, now even in the internet age there is still the hook of meeting and greeting in the flesh, comparing and admiring bicycles and drinking in refreshment that was essentially the same in 50’s car culture. Perhaps without the drag racing now, but the ethos remains close. Social media chat is a part of life now but nothing really compares with ordering an increasingly unpronounceable drink with friends and spinning freewheels leaned against the wall next to your table, for getting ideas and interaction rather than swiping left on your lap closed off from the world, inside a screen.
Once the hubbub of breakfast had died down and been delivered to workplaces around this village of sorts, Handlebar Cafe had been left to the lifers like me sat down and plugged in for the long haul. It was about this point I remember being taken for a tour of the establishment by it’s owners. Former pro-cyclists Aaron and Kim had started this local pub of a cafe back in 2011 after a natural end to a comfortable career in the saddle across the globe. It’s usual now to see a high end coffee outlet tie in with a local cycling culture and pair up with it’s tribes to create union in subculture, but back then it was a fresher approach for the cycling family to the usual hope that a cafe would have a visible lamp post to lean £30k of bikes against.
Obviously the smell of coffee is a known stimulant utilised by estate agents to sell houses, but in-house coffee roasting takes the idea and turns it up to eleven. I have spent a few hours now in the close proximity to machines preparing coffee beans for their end users and it’s the kind of smell you hope won’t wash out of a T shirt or wear off a memory.
I wouldn’t say I know my beans when it comes to coffee like perhaps I knew my Kodak film grains of yesteryear but I can recognise when a combination of passion and skill collide and out comes a subtle feed of power-up material engaging in performance with confidence stamped by aroma to make handing over your hard earned a welcome part of the pageant. The 1980s TV ad’s where instant coffee making man in the kitchen faked steam whooshes and splutters in order to authenticate his abomination to the easily impressed date in the living room kind of sums up where making coffee both needed to be socially and found itself living thirty something years later. In a way just like knowing who actually made your chosen, expensive, loved bike frame by hand and how long it took them to do it adds authenticity and feeling to the otherwise automated and robotic, soulless procedure of most bikes’ creation devoid of humanity. The hiss, steam and early victorian-like mechanisation of an espresso machine creates theatre worthy of this nectar of the cycling gods. Watching it re-enact each time isn’t like pressing a button and waiting for a cup to drop containing your awakening-to-go, it’s a sensual drama played out in front of you, out of proportion to what is produced in your honour but a welcome ingredient of it nonetheless.
Watching the focus of hands opening valves and turning levers shrouded by tiny pockets of escaping heat in front of you while talking in a clear voice over the whooshes and drama, similar to the Emerald City behind the curtain scene from The Wizard of Oz is like seeing a circus of steam and sound performing just for you in exchange for one of your gold coins. You even get a dribble of nectar captured in a small paper cup at the end of the performance to take home with you.
A message of delay for my pick up saw me seated back at the front line starting to write up the story of the previous couple of days road trip north up the centre of the country before I flew out to the west ahead of flying east to London then south to home in the French Pyrenees. My words and memories became constantly interlaced with other people’s stories as they wandered past to the door and in the end I decided instead to pick up the camera that was having a rest at my feet and subtly record what a morning in Handlebar coffee looked like. The couple on the bar stools at the window dreaming, the faces queueing for their place in this ritual as a small part of their own bigger picture that day, the reappearance of the boss with fresh roasted beans for the next round – every direction had a different scene of somebody’s day connected through rich aromas.
It seemed a good time to ask if I could make the portrait of these two local dignitaries and we stepped outside to where new friends of old friends were having a pre ride watering before heading into the backdrop hills behind us. Click, click, done. My escort Jeff arrived in a 1983 Porsche 911 fitting to what I’d imagined a Californian dream life ought to look like and off we went, cameras and computer stuffed across the back seat in front of the engine in the boot. After this afternoon’s appointment with pedals, the next photographic stop would be Aaron Stinner’s handmade Frameworks down the road tomorrow hastily organised a couple of hours earlier by new friends I would see there at work the next day.
My first and to date only experience of California had lived up to it’s paradise billing by friends and colleagues but the part that struck me most was feeling included by this community after only a day and not being treated like the outsider with a strange dialect I in fact was. That and being picked up from the airport in an all time favourite car then blasting past Hollywood greats’ palm tree lined mansions like a scene from an 80’s movie. I made connections in this town of creatives that would go on to become friends that could keep me in caffeine thousands of miles away. On reflection I was probably still in culture shock on arrival in California from what was my kind of America, the America of the road movie the week before in New Mexico, but I was made to feel so at home here by relative strangers that I can’t help thinking I will return. But with bike rather than with camera.