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Specs
- Frameset weight: 5kg, ish… or around 11lbs.
- Colours: Sky Blue, Dark Sage
- Sizes: 52, 54, 57
- Price: £800 ($1,070)
- Wheel size: 27.5″
There’s been a steady change in the world of the best gravel bikes in recent years towards greater and greater emulation of mountain bikes. Bigger tyres, suspension, slacker geometry, but everything has been somewhat incremental. A hair more clearance here, a half degree more rad in the head tube there; don’t upset the market, we’ve got a good thing going on here!
Stooge, a boutique brand based in Shropshire, makes ‘beautiful bikes that stand outside of any trends or fashions, that handle wonderfully and challenge the common perception that a rigid bike is a lesser bike.’ Its bikes are quite different, and have been pushing massive tyres and progressive geometry for some years now.
I’ll admit, I’ve been a Stooge customer. I’ve drunk the Kool-Aid. I owned a beautiful blue MK4 that I smashed about the Lake District on before selling it to my far more capable colleague, Graham. As such, I was quite excited to call in, build up, and then test out the Rambler, the brand’s only drop bar offering. It’s not been plain sailing, though. It’s a great bike for some things, but for others it’s decidedly flawed. It’s put a big grin on my face at times, and offers up a taste of a wonderfully juvenile ride experience, but at other times it has left me frustrated at the sheer bloody-minded contrarianism of the thing.
Design and aesthetics
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You don’t have to be a bike expert to see that the Stooge Rambler is a different beast from basically every other gravel bike out there. It’s steel, which you’ll probably have guessed, but fabricated with a beautiful split top tube that curves down either side of the seat tube to become the seat stays. You might not have noticed that, though, because the fork is usually what people look at first. A chunky, twin-plate crown with sloping shoulders anchors the legs, beset with endless eyelets, that curve and taper in a deeply classique way.
It’s not suspension-corrected, either. It’s designed to be run rigid, with a super-slack 69º head angle and capacity for a humongous 2.8” tyre up front (not quite matched by 2.6” in the rear). You could run it with mudguards and still have room for 2.4” tyres, which is pretty wild, and something I may try out down the line when the weather turns.
You can’t get complete builds, so if you want one be prepared to either build it yourself or employ the help of a decent bike shop. If you live within striking distance of the New Forest, the lovely Woods Cyclery has plenty of experience, and it makes a nice weekend away if nothing else. Building it yourself, as I found, is a bit of a nightmare, and why, despite having had the frame since January 2025, it took me so long to actually get around to reviewing the thing.
It’s a drop bar bike, though you could run it with flat bars with a longer stem than is advised. SRAM is probably your best bet for inter-compatibility here, but I went with Shimano GRX, before realising that the cranks wouldn’t fit, as it has an MTB width BSA BB shell in the eccentric bottom bracket (something that allows you to run it singlespeed, if you so wish). Deore crank it is, then. You can’t fit a complete GRX brake, though, as the brake mounts are IS mount, not flat mount, so I had to opt for XT brake callipers with IS mount adapters. The wheels are 27.5”, or 650b for you roadies, a standard that is as good as dead for gravel bikes and not hugely common for MTB either, especially when the rear axle spacing is non-boost.
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Basically, you need to make your life easy and do what Stooge suggests and just get a set of Hope Fortus wheels, which are good but not the lightest. I shod mine with Vittoria Mezcals, which have since been renamed the T70.
Stooge suggests choosing a size that allows you to run a 50-60mm stem, and initially that’s what I did, but then swapped to a 90mm when I found I felt just a bit too off the back of the bike; my roadie is showing, I guess.
A dropper was a must for a bike that pertains to be supremely capable on the rough stuff, topped with a Brooks Swift saddle, partially because I love Brooks saddles as they allow me to ride without padded shorts, and partially because it looks right. Actually the whole thing looks right; it’s gorgeous, and got just as many admiring comments from my riding buddies as when I turn up on the next ‘worlds fastest aero bike’. Even strangers would tell me it was beautiful, which rarely ever happens.
Looks matter little, though, if it doesn’t ride well, and it does in the right context.
Performance
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The clue, as I found out to the cost of my knees, is in the name. This is a bike predisposed to ambling. Smell the flowers, enjoy the view, take a photo, take your time. It is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a fast bike, and as such, it required a bit of mental recalibration. I took it on a speedy gravel group ride one evening, involving a fair bit of elevation, and got home feeling like I must be very fatigued, as I simply couldn’t keep up. Dropped like a stone on every climb. I got the scales out, out of curiosity:
15.12kg.
Fifteen! That’s as-ridden, with a frame bag of spares (a small multi-tool, a small mini-pump, a TPU tube, a tubeless plug, and some plastic levers), half an un-drunk water bottle, and a computer, but even so, fifteen kilograms in bike terms means it weighs the same as the USS Enterprise. The wheels aren’t all that light, but it’s by no means a heavy build. Yes, it has a leather saddle, but it also has carbon bars, titanium bottle cages, and I even swapped out as many of the 3,000 M5 boss bolts to titanium ones as I could. That’s like riding a Crux with a second Crux on your back. Hell, it’s more than some e-bikes now, and it really does slow you down uphill. This only matters if you’re gasping trying to keep up with your usual group ride, but even if you’re not, it makes life harder if you live somewhere lumpy.
Loaded up with an off-road tour’s worth of stuff, the additional weight of the bike makes up a smaller proportion of the overall system weight, but it is worth bearing in mind that this is still bulk you’re going to be shipping up hill and down dale regardless of pace.
The weight also has impacts outside of climbs. On singletrack, it felt rather cumbersome, though I will admit I am used to much more road-like front ends, but I put this down to a combo of the bulk of the thing and the 69º head angle.
It is, to all intents and purposes, a mountain bike, but lacks the agility. However, on some terrain, it absolutely shines. Genuine off-road rambling is a delight. A jaunt to the woods to pick wild garlic was joyous, and any time I pointed it downhill, on or off-road, I was left beaming like an eight-year-old. It is absurdly stable, whatever the surface, and on flowing open corners, you can hit them at warp speed. I even managed to pick up a top ten on a popular road descent, mostly because I could drop the saddle and stay in a supertuck with absolute confidence. I do think fitting a slightly longer stem than was advised made it grip a little better at the front end, but that is going to be a personal fit issue. It’s doing the bike a disservice to simply distil it down to a ‘modern klunker’, but of any bike I’ve ever ridden, it screams more than anything else ‘ride up a big lumpy hill just to send it back down again’, and I kind of love it for that. Did I pretend in my mind’s eye that I was hurling down the Repack course in late ‘70’s California? Of course I did.
Weirdly, I was about to type ‘you needn’t be put off by the lack of a suspension fork’, before I remembered it’s a gravel bike and that’s still very much not the norm. It actually feels like, as tyres get wider, the short-term industry flirtation with suspension doesn’t seem to have blossomed into a full romance, so in this regard it’s future-proof.
It’s a lot of bike to ramble about on, but if you measure your rides by time rather than distance, watts, calories, or some sort of suffer-based metric, it very quickly gets under your skin. It may be flawed, it may weigh a ton, but when I am on my own and not chasing a group, I haven’t had a ride on it I didn’t enjoy, whether that’s in the woods or just going to buy paint from the hardware store. If my home city of Bristol weren’t so bad for bike theft and it weren’t so clearly going to draw attention, I’d use it every day for everything.
I also ran it initially with flats before swapping to clipless gravel pedals. While it’s slow on climbs, the massive tyres and low gearing on offer with what is effectively an MTB drivetrain mean you could probably ride up the side of a building, albeit slowly. I was able to rumble over steep, rocky terrain that I have often found myself walking up on less.
Value
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Normally, in this bit, I compare X option to Y option, but there really isn’t anything comparable to compare the rambler to. For £800, a figure itself that shows it’s based on what the brand thinks it’s worth rather than £799.99 to trick you, you get a steel frame that can ride over almost any terrain. You can run it drop bar or flat bar, you can fit a rack, a full frame bag, you could run it fixed if you’re a moron, or singlespeed if you just need your head examined in a good way. You can run a pannier rack, you can run mudguards AND still have capacity to fit mega tyres. It can sort of do whatever you want it to off-road, other than go fast.
I would say part of the fun, if you can call realising yet another part won’t fit because of some needlessly contrarian design decisions, fun, is in the building of the thing. Much like the Fairlights I’ve ridden, it’s a delight to work on, once everything is in order. External everything, big bolts, threaded bottom bracket. It’s utilitarian, and all the better for it, and despite the massive weight of the thing, I think it’s pretty good value for £800 if it fits your use case.
Verdict
It’s hard for me to overlook the sheer mass of the thing. It really does hamstring the ride feel for the kind of gravel riding I do, and it makes singletrack a bit of a battle. It’s not aero, it’s been a nightmare to put together with quite backwards-thinking standards, it’s so close to being a mountain bike that you should probably just get a mountain bike…and yet I love it, that’s the mad thing.
Before I spent my time testing aero bikes and deliberating on the advantages and disadvantages of aerodynamic tyres, I used to spend a significant portion of my riding time essentially messing about. I’d ride up Lake District passes on a late ‘80’s Specialized Rockhopper with a saddlebag of sandwiches for the joy of the endeavour. I rode truly horrendous fixed-gear gravel bikes and ancient tandems. I even made myself a cantilever-brake, downtube shifter touring bike and rode it halfway down France.
In fact, my happiest memory on a bike was riding through the woods in Sweden on a beat-up town bike with a coaster brake. None of these bikes was terribly good by any measurable metric, but they all brought or continue to bring me immense joy, and the Rambler kinda fits into this category. Just typing this now, I want to go and ride it for a little while in the woods.
You can’t really compare it to modern gravel bikes because it’s not designed to do the same job. If you want to set an FKT, this isn’t the bike to do it on. I can absolutely see why The Woods Cyclery stocks them, though, as I think it might be the perfect bike for the New Forest, or cosplaying the pages of the Rough Stuff Fellowship Archive photobooks.
Would I change anything if I had my time again to build it? I think I’d stick a wide range 50.4 BCD double chainset on it and make it work somehow – I’ve seen it done –, and have a real crawler gear for uphill and a bigger ring for the rest of the time. I’d leave flat pedals on and fit a small front rack. I’d probably fit mudguards too, and probably some 2.25” Schwalbe G-One Allround tyres, and stop trying to treat it like MTB-minus and view it more as gravel-plus. I still might do all of these things. Maybe I’ll go all in and lace a coaster brake to the rear rim and see how quickly I can vaporise the grease inside it…
|
Design and aesthetics |
Full marks for the look of the thing, but the insistence on using outdated standards makes it an annoying bike to build. |
7/10 |
|
Weight |
It’s monumentally hefty. It’s the heaviest bike I’ve ridden, besides fully loaded touring bikes and tandems. |
4/10 |
|
Performance |
While it barrels down descents, and handles technical terrain with aplomb, the weight makes it a sapping climber and a sluggish singletrack machine too. |
6/10 |
|
Build |
I built it, but even I can’t give myself full marks. The narrow selection of 27.5″ non-boost wheelsets means there’s only so good you can make the build. The lack of integration does make life better though. |
6/10 |
|
Value |
Considering how adaptable the frameset is, it’s not bad value for £800 |
8/10 |
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Total |
Row 5 – Cell 1 |
62% |