The Tenn Outdoors Espresso jersey – made from real coffee!

“It’s actually made of coffee…”

Out of all the new kit vying for our attention at Eurobike, some less desirable than others, Tenn Outdoors made us really perk up. Despite not being actual roasted Colombian beans, their riding gear got our hearts racing. (That’s enough caffeine-related gags – Ed.)

The Espresso jersey is intended as an all-day riding top, so to put it through its paces we went racing downhill in it. Not quite the same thing, but a downhill day’s mix of gassing through technical singletrack like a sweaty nutter and sitting around is a good test of the comfort of a jersey. If it dries slowly, you get cold and if it’s going to get stinky you sure know about it by the end of the day.

Not a downhill top by any means, but perfect testing for odour capabilities (Photo MRF Media)

By this point you are probably wondering what we’re going on about with the coffee, so stick the kettle on and let’s get down to it.

The S.Café® fabric comes from an eco-friendly background. S Café say that 7.6 million tons of the good stuff are produced each year, and the majority of the waste goes to landfill. By incorporating waste coffee into the fabric, they extend the use of the bean, and the coffee fibres absorb odour indefinitely.

Waste coffee grounds are incorporated into the fibres during production, and as your sweat passes through the fabric smells are ‘sucked’ into the pores. To anyone who’s been foolish enough to store ground coffee in the fridge, this makes sense – the coffee ends up tasting of the other fridge contents.

Here’s S.Café’s explanatory video on the fabric’s pong-removing and other properties:

And it certainly seems to work. The jersey is comfortable on the bike, and after a day’s enthusiastic thrashing it doesn’t pong too much.

The Espresso jersey uses S.Café fabric on the front and back, with side panels made of a more standard polyester. Under the hem there’s the welcome addition of a sunglass friendly cloth.

Just at the bottom of the jersey there’s a cloth for getting moisture of your specs

Our size medium sample fitted well, but perhaps could’ve been slightly more fitted and the long arms did feel a bit loose. This top would be great as a 3/4 design and I spent most of the day with the sleeves pulled up.

At the end of a rather humid, damp day of constant pedalling we felt dry and the material had done its job of wicking away the sweat – it would only be better if it actually smelt of coffee!

Verdict

A great buy for your riding closet and at £39.99 we were also pleasantly surprised on the value.

Pros

Eco-friendly material
Reduces post-ride pong
Light feel
Great value

Cons

An overall closer fit would be welcome

More information: Tenn Outdoors Espresso jersey
Sizes: Men’s S – 3XL; Women’s 8-18
Options: Short-sleeve version (£37.99); women’s version; also in brown.
Price:  £39.99

And we’re also impressed at the robustness of the LED rear light featured here, which is cheerfully flashing away despite being frozen in a block of ice and turned into one of those dreadful cold-milk coffee drinks inexplicably beloved of our Colonial cousins.

As any coffee purist knows, coffee comes in two forms: caffè latte for breakfast and espresso for the rest of the day. Cold milk figures in neither, and should be reserved for its intended purpose of being served with chocolate biscuits to small children.

Our initial guess was that the blinker steadfastly carrying on regardless in there is one of Lezyne’s new Femto range.

Lezyne calls it a Year 6 LED though, and our man Rory at Lezyne importer Upgrade Bikes points out “you can’t see exactly what is in the ice,” so maybe it’s something else. All will apparently be revealed later this week.

The Femto lights were announced at Sea Otter earlier this year and covered by our skinny-tyre brethren at roadcyclinguk.com.

But we’re mentioning it here cos everyone needs a tough back light and also, coffee.

More info, eventually, at lezyne.com and Upgrade Bikes.