This review isn’t entirely about this specific bar. It’s about riser bars, because most bikes come stock with relatively flat bars, but most riders, in my opinion, benefit from the added leverage of a riser, especially if you’re riding a lot of technical terrain. It’s about getting a little more leverage over the front end, which makes the bike a little more agile, which in turn makes taking on obstacles a little easier.
It’s all marginal gains, if you believe in that sort of thing.
I went with this Deity BlackLabel bar for three reasons. First, my friend Jim, who owns Battle Road Bikes, told me it’d look cool, and that it’s the bar all the kids are riding now. Second, at $89.99 it was a relatively cheap way to find out if more rise was going to help me.
Obviously, at that price, it’s aluminum, and I’m also into metal components where I don’t think carbon fiber isn’t going to make a big difference to ride quality. Aluminum is biodegradable, so when I’m done shredding whatever gnar is still in me to shred, I can rest easy knowing my handlebars will also return to dust. This aluminum is the 7075 T73 alloy, which has a high tensile strength, good for “high stress” applications, like hurling your body through the narrow confines of a tree strewn single-track playground.
Third, it comes in 8 colors, so I could get a bar that matched my bike in a way that wouldn’t make me want to vomit every time I threw a leg over. For those of you who love vomit-inducing colors (no judgement), there are plenty of garish hues on offer.
I went with the gray on black, for the record. Oh, and the 25mm rise. I put these on my hardtail, because the days I ride that bike, I’m looking for a very technical, very precise ride. That little bit of extra leverage makes it easier for me to pick up my front wheel and put it down exactly where I want it. If you’re still riding a flat-ish bar, I highly recommend giving yourself a little more lift and seeing if you like it. I will also be upgrading my dual-suspension ride to this bar, or something with a similar rise.
The Deity BlackLabel starts at 800mm wide (although I trimmed mine), and comes in 15mm, 25mm and 38mm rise.
This is an interesting article. I would like to point out that an advantage of aluminum is that it can be recycled almost indefinitely, so though it may eventually biodegrade, it would be much more environmentally conscious to recycle the bar than throw it away.