The Tanglefoot Moonshiner Review

August 09, 2024

I like riding bicycles. The Tanglefoot Moonshiner is a very, very weird bike. It's also an excellent bike. It might just be the perfect bicycle for Northern New England in 2024.

When we lived in Colorado, I thought mountain biking was ridiculous. A bunch of Lycra-clad crazies riding lifts to the top of giant mountains to try to zoom down as fast as possible on bermy trails that might as well be pavement? Driving up and down I-70 in bumper-to-bumper traffic to get to the mountain in the summer? Paying for a day pass just to ride your bike? What's the fun in that? I preferred dirt roads, touring bikes, and city riding, because to me, bicycling is all about having fun on your bike while using the bike as a means of travel. On trails, why not just hike and avoid the mechanical investment?

We moved to New England a few years ago, and I re-assessed. All of the (decent) local towns have extensive mountain biking networks. The land is mostly "loaned" to the networks by locals and maintained by community volunteers (or, in the fanciest towns, one or two underpaid professional mountain bike enthusiasts). The vast majority of trail systems aren't ski resorts, and don't have lifts, so folks actually have to "earn their turns" by riding up the hill. Many of the trail systems were built by volunteers, often decades ago, and could easily be confused with your average Appalachian hiking trail. Even the best trail networks often have just one zoomy, bermy trail where all of the Intense Fast Serious Mountain Biking lads hang out, lapping repeatedly to get the best Strava times. That leaves the rest of the network for the Not So Serious Not So Intense Not So Fast Biking folks.

So I tried trail running on our extensive town trails. I did a few rides out of Littleton to nearby towns and points of interest. I realised that there really isn't much bicycle riding to be done on rural New Hampshire roads. And what little there is, you have to share with giant trucks.

So I tried riding my touring bike (which is actually a 90s mountain bike) on the local trails. I found my way all the way up to the summit. Then I met some riders who looked at me like I was insane for riding a rigid 1x7 26" bicycle on a mountain biking trail in 2022.

I rode my bike home. I had a lot of fun. But I recognised a few things that day:

• mountain biking requires a swath of technical skills that I did not have in 2022
• everyone else thinks you need a $3000 full suspension carbon fiber bicycle to ride a bike around some rocks and roots up hills in the trees
• riding your bicycle in the woods seems kind of fun

So I did some research. I interrogated some innocent bicycle shop employees about the necessity of suspension. I learned about hardtails vs. full squish, and frame materials, and wheel sizes, and brake types, and enduro bikes, and trail bikes, and ...I kind of lost interest after that.

So I bought myself my first mountain bike. More money than I wanted to spend, but less than recommended. I got a steel hardtail that was marketed a little too hard at your average bikepacker-wannabee. The suspension fork was fine, though not top-of-the-line. The components were all pretty good, thanks to a pretty solid deal from a local bike shop owner.

That bike, Falkor, served me well for my first year in Littleton. I went from barely capable of riding down the simplest trails to descending some of the hardest blacks in my local network. But after all that time, something bothered me: I just didn't really give a shit about the suspension. Everyone insisted that it was irreplaceable. Folks would tell me about how they couldn't imagine riding even the most basic trails without it. But when I left my fork totally locked out on the stiffest setting possible, where the fork doesn't even move if you put all of your weight on it... it didn't really bother me. I often forgot to disable the lockout after enabling it on dirt roads to connect trails. I wondered, sometimes aloud, why everyone seemed convinced that suspension is The Only Way. Surely other people, more knowledgeable than me, had proven it somehow?

This curiosity culminated in a pilgrimage to the Mecca of Northeast weird woodsy rigid bike riding: Analog Cycles, in Poultney, Vermont.

My first visit, I took my hardtail, took a long ride around their class IV roads and mountain biking network, and camped at the shop's sugar shack. I gazed at the Moonshiner in awe, but only took it out for a very brief spin. Drop bars were foreign to me, and I already had a bike, anyway.

My second visit, I took a Tanglefoot Moonshiner for a test ride. I immediately started the fitting and parts selection process for my own Tanglefoot Moonshiner.

A year later, I sold my hardtail.

A year later, I wrote this post.

Design

The Tanglefoot Moonshiner is weird. Inspired by bikes from the late 1800s and early 1900s, very few modern bikes share its stack design and high bottom bracket. It's kind of a combination of the English roadster, a Team Fat Chance Yo Eddy, and a Salsa Cutthroat. The drop bars are lifted so high that you wind up sitting in a much more upright position than your average drop bar bike. You wind up spending most of your time in the drops, rather than on the hoods.

I can't speak about ride quality, tubing feel, and other highfalutin murky bicycle review concepts. I'll leave that to the bikepacking.com review. But I can speak to my own subjective experience: the Moonshiner is comfortable to ride, even for long stretches of time. It feels solid. It is certainly heavier than a lot of carbon mountain bikes out there, but it's not heavy enough to stop me from riding it up crazy hills all day long. The lightest mountain-trail capable bikes, like the rigid Salsa Cutthroat, weigh around 10kg. The Moonshiner clocks in at 13kg. So do pretty much all aluminum full suspension bikes. Carbon full suspension bikes tend to be a kg or two lighter. Those 3kg between a rigid steel bike and a rigid carbon bike could impact your times in a race, but they're a drop in the bucket compared to the weight of yourself and all of your bikepacking gear. Hell, a decent U-lock weighs in at around 2kgs, and I need to drag one of those along to prevent my bike from getting stolen in most parts of the world. The parts of a Moonshiner are all stronger, more repairable, and easily maintainable with a few basic tools at home. I'd rather take those benefits than trade them off for a couple of kgs that I won't even notice. So if you race, sure, feel free to complain about the weight of a steel bike. But in any other case, who cares about a 5% gain, at the cost of repairability and durability?

Parts

Pedals: they're orange. I try to smack them into things as little as possible. They're pretty easy to clean, and provide a massive sticky platform for my vans or bedrock sandals. If I have to bail on a particularly chunky section of trail, or I slip on a wet rock, I don't have to unclip to save myself. The anodisation has worn off in places, but is generally in good shape. 10/10, except when I manage to dig them into my shin, which fortunately happens rarely.

Cranks: My White Industries cranks are very nice. But it's annoying that you have to use a special bottom bracket tool to add and remove chainrings. Replacement chainrings are very pricey, and only come in aluminum. Very high torque spec, so much so that you almost certainly need a torque wrench. They look nice, they feel nice, but you should honestly just get a cheaper set of cranks unless you're totally married to White industries. They use 10mm self-tightening bolts and an inner 8mm to tighten the dust cap, which is a pretty smart design, because idiots like me won't get confused about tightening the dust cap but not getting to the self-tightening bolt itself. But you won't be tightening this on the trail because the torque spec is only barely reachable by human arms with a large allen key, let alone your multitool (which probably doesn't have a 10mm key anyway).

Saddle: I originally put a brooks saddle on this bike. Unfortunately, my bony ass is a weird shape, so it's not the ideal fit. And that created a lot of squeaking from my brooks. So I eventually got fed up with it and swapped my beautiful leather brooks saddle for a spare Terry Butterfly saddle we had laying around that Meg never ended up putting on her bike (ironically, in favor of... a Brooks saddle). I'd like to try a Brooks C17 at some point, but for now, the butterfly is fantastic. No saddle sores after super long rides, and totally water resistant? Sounds good to me.

Ultra Wide Drivetrain: It's partially my fault for skipping the expensive and somewhat gaudy-looking Garbaruk replacement derailleur cage (at first), but my shifting with my original SRAM Rival drivetrain never quite worked perfectly. This is the only bike I've ever had with serious, unsolvable, persistent shifting issues. And it would degrade over time, drifting depending on the day, cleanliness of the chain, and phase of the moon. I have fortunately since fixed the issue entirely by switching to a microSHIFT Sword drivetrain. That being said: I don't recommend speccing your Moonshiner with a Rival drivetrain, let alone exceeding the spec of the Rival derailleur the way that Analog likes to. SRAM is doing some pretty trashy things anyway, pushing more and more proprietary standards and raising their price points, so you might as well just avoid them altogether. microSHIFT seems like a great, small company that's doing a great job with affordable 9 and 10 speed non-electric gravel drivetrains, so take a look there first unless you truly need something at the top 1% of performance. Nobody needs to waste money on replacement wear parts for a SRAM drivetrain anymore, when microSHIFT performs well enough for 99% of bicycles.

Brakes: This is my first experience with Paul Klampers, and they are easily the best brakes I've ever used. Strong, reliant braking, easily tweaked to be as strong (or as gradual) as you prefer. Easy to adjust without a multitool!. Easy to replace the pads. Easy to clean. Easy to replace the wires. No hydraulic fluid to freeze up, spill everywhere, or bleed. And damn do they look sharp.

Cable Stops: I never thought I'd actually mention this in a review, but I seriously recommend Forager cable cherries. You'll never have to buy a brake cable ferrule again! They also look better than ferrules, and you can reuse them. Note: these require the tiniest, strangest-sized allen key you've ever seen, 1.5mm IIRC. And of course they're 1000x the price of ferrules. But at least you'll waste less metal when you replace cables!

Handlebars: My Moonshiner is a drop bar mountain bike. I've tried drop bars on traditional mountain bikes, and they aren't great. They're too low, so they wind up hurting my back and pushing way too much of my weight onto the front tire of the bike. That can be nice on climbs, but feels downright dangerous when you zoom downhill. The tall stack on the Moonshiner puts drop bars high. Really high. So high, you can comfortably hang out in the drops all the time. It takes some getting used to, but it's really really cozy. And you can always hop up onto the hoods or the top bar to change things up if you start to get sore. I could seriously ride this thing around all day. (I do!) Because this setup has a variety of comfortable hand positions, it's great for trips long and short, speeds fast and slow. Flat bars now feel cheap and awkward when I ride other mountain bikes.

Riding around on old-school New England trails has showed me another benefit of drop bars: drop bars, even flared gravel ones, are significantly narrower than modern mountain bike flat bars. On tight mountain bike trails built for smaller 90s bicycles, the trees have grown thicker over the decades, narrowing the trail. I've encountered trials that I literally could not ride on my hardtail because the trees are too tight for an 800mm handlebar. But the Moonshiner is thin enough to squeeze through with no problem.

Handlebar Tape: My Moonshiner originally used corduroy fabric bar tape. It felt great, looked great, but loses serious points for durability. As sweat and rain seeped in, parts of the tape turned black, wore down to lose their texture entirely, and started to separate and even became threadbare, exposing the underlying gel. I swapped the original tape out for some (Meg-wrapped -- thank you!) Brooks tape, and I couldn't be happier with it. I worry a little about what's in this tape, because it lasts forever. Over a year later, it still looks brand new. Some kind of radioactive material? Pure cancer-inducing plastic? But hey, at least I won't have to replace it any time soon.

Shifters and Brake Levers: My original SRAM Rival shifters and brake levers felt good. Solid texture, ergonomics, and materials. Upshifting was a mite tricky, since it shares a lever with downshifting -- push it to upshift, push it harder to downshift. It's easy to accidentally turn upshifts into downshifts on those levers on a mountain bike trail as you're zooming down (or crawling up) a trail. But it worked well overall. My replacement microSHIFT Sword shifters and brake levers use separate buttons for up and downshifts. The down one feels a little loose, but it's clearly an intentional part of the design, so I'll give it a pass. The hoods have a pleasing shape, if a bit bigger than the rival levers, but they overall serve me well and feel very comfortable on the trail. Full points to both sets of levers.

Stack and Stem: Most modern bikes use stems that position the handlebars at least a couple of inches in front of the stack. My Moonshiner uses a custom stem called the creemee stem which holds your handlebars right on top like a dollop of soft serve ice cream on a cone. It's hard to say how much the "zero reach" stem matters, but the handling on my moonshiner is superior to every other mountain bike I've ever ridden. I can whip my front wheel around extremely easily to dodge obstacles on the trail, cutting precise, surgical paths when I want to. And when I'm zooming down a hill, it doesn't feel too touchy. Is it the zero-reach? Is it the drop bars? All of that moonshine? I don't know, but it slaps.

Dynamo Lights: Not necessary. But it fills me with joy to think that if I ever need a front and rear light or a cell phone charge, all I have to do is flip a switch. It's nice for bikepacking. It makes me feel safer when I connect trails with roads, or ride to nearby trail systems from my home. It's comforting on rides around the winter solstice, when it sometimes feels like we don't have a sun at all. The Sinewave Beacon has served me well for years, providing more than enough light to ride as fast as I ever want to at night, first on my touring bike, now on my Moonshiner. My rear light is visible and reliant. And I even got to solder it all myself, learning a thing or two about electric wiring and coaxial connectors as I did it. If you have the means, I highly recommend it.

Paint: My Moonshiner's paint is noticeably easier to scuff and wear completely off than any other bike I've ever had. Just from using a front bag that pinned some cables to the head tube, I've managed to wear off a huge chunk of paint on the head tube all the way to raw steel. A section of the downtube has worn down to raw steel as well, presumably from a frame bag, though I've only put frame bags on the bike for a fraction of it's life. The drive-side chainstay and seatstay are scuffed to hell and back after a derailleur-breaking incident where I lacked a chain tool, so I had to dangle the chain and derailleur off of the frame for a mile back to my house. This frame may be for life, but this paint job? no way in hell is it going to last 29 years like the setup on my touring bike has, or even the 5 years that my bikepacking-oriented hardtail (used very similarly, only scratched from glacial errata strikes on the rear triangle) did.

Tires: My 3" Terevail Coronados are more than enough on mountain biking trails and class 4 roads, providing plenty of grip unless it's super wet out, and plenty of cushion on the rugged stuff. Big enough to provide some float, or grip, or something along those lines in mud puddles. I could probably go down to a 2.5" tire or so before I started to feel outclassed by local terrain. They feel a little big and clunky on the most boring terrain: roads and rail trails. But they're not as knobbly as some MTB tires, and without suspension, that stuff is bearable for a few miles. These tires are absolutely perfect for chonky Vermont dirt roads, providing the cushion you need to ride over hefty potholes and washboards. Also big enough to ride on fat tire groomed snow trails when conditions are optimal without sinking in at all. Beware: many trail networks require 3.5-3.7" tires, so it's up to you if you want to risk pissing anyone off. It's unlikely that anyone is going to take calipers out to measure your tire, but I've definitely gotten some looks from the most judgmental locals. In general, I don't think it's a big deal if I'm not sinking into the trail. But I'm also very cautious to not ride when we're cracking above the freezing point with groomed trails. When in doubt, don't be a jerk.

Wheel Stuff: My rear hub works well, and most importantly, is silent. My SON28 front dynamo hub is amazing and rock-solid, just like the one on my touring bike. Rims are rims. I have velocity blunts; they're aluminum, and quite wide. When you smack them into things, they sometimes dent, but are very unlikely to crack unless you get hit by a train or something, in which case you have much bigger problems. When they bend, you can bend them back, and everything works the same as it ever was. That's my aluminium rim sales pitch. Disclaimer: 'bending back' doesn't get things quite perfect enough when it comes to tubeless tires. For those, you should probably just go carbon and try not to be the idiot who cracks his rims. Personally, I don't find tubeless worthwhile. It's a lot of goo and a lot of pain when you want to swap tires, and I don't notice any improvement in ride quality. But if you live somewhere with a lot of cactus or goats head thorns or have a really mean cat with really sharp claws, I understand that it could be worthwhile.

Vibes

I really don't understand "stiff" vs "flexy" frames, how to tell the difference between different tubing, and how geometry influences your bicycle ride. I'm not sure anyone really does. But I can tell you that this bicycle is damn comfortable, even when you ride it over brutal roots, rocks, and anything else trail systems throw at you. Comparable to a full suspension bicycle in many ways, though you have to know how to ride it -- unlike a full-suspension bicycle, you can't just bomb right at any path you choose. You have to be a little more strategic. Anyway, my hands rarely ache, I never get any of those "vibration jitters" that I feel on aluminum bikes, it's light enough for me to pick up and carry over downed trees and through rivers pretty easily, and the frame hasn't cracked or rusted out yet. Score one for steel.

Enjoy my photo gallery of pretty Moonshiner pics below:

What is Moonshining?

Riding 365 days a year, on the same bike, on the same trails.

Using one bicycle to explore class IV roads in Vermont, connect mountain biking trail networks, go on bikepacking trips, and ride my local trails.

In 2024, Northern New England barely gets a month total of significant snow on the ground. Torrential downpours routinely render trail networks a series of loosely-connected mud puddles throughout the summer. I've never gone more than two weeks without hitting the local trails on a normal mountain bike. I ride in October, November, December, January, February, March, and April. I ride in the summer. I ride on snow. I ride through mud puddles. And the Moonshiner makes all of that fun.

To me, Moonshining is about two things:

• having fun on my bike
• DIY

Having a steel bike full of well-made components that will last me basically forever makes me happy. I enjoy learning how to maintain my bike. I don't care about suspension, or fragile carbon parts. I'm perfectly happy using mechanical brakes that I can tune in my own home and paying the 3kg weight cost of steel and aluminum parts. I don't race, and I don't care about speed. I think it's cool to support small, often USA-local brands that make really cool parts for bikes that you cannot get anywhere else (see: my dynamo light, my cranks, my rims, and my stem).

If that sounds reasonable to you, maybe you should visit Analog down in Poultney and take a Moonshiner (or a Hardtack, the Moonshiner's lighter little brother) for a spin. If that doesn't sound reasonable to you, ask your local bike shop about demoing carbon full-suspension bike. Different strokes for different folks; I'm just glad that folks like me finally have something cool and novel. Special thanks to James for making this awesome bicycle design happen, and of course to Analog for building this bike for me.