Our Blister Mountain Bike Buyer’s Guide has been a long time in the making, and we’re excited to bring it to light. As many of you know, our annual Winter Buyer’s Guide covers hundreds of the current skis, snowboards, and other pieces of gear we spent the past year reviewing, and this is the mountain bike version — with a few key differences.
What Makes This Guide Different
Because the bike industry is increasingly forgoing model years and instead launches new products year-round, this is going to be the first ‘rolling’ bike guide out there — we will be continually updating it as we review more bikes and have new ones to add.
What also makes our guide different from other bike guides out there is that we’ve spent months on every single bike in here. So you aren’t getting quick impressions based on just a ride or two; you’re getting our fully-formed thoughts after truly getting to know each and every bike, and how they compare to each other.
How This Guide Complements Our Full Reviews
This guide does two incredibly valuable things:
1) It provides you with a quicker, more easily digestible look at a number of products than our full reviews do.
2) It provides a high-level overview of each category to help you get a better handle on what’s going on — today — in each category; to help you understand the range of bikes in each category; and to help you better understand the tradeoffs you’ll be making when considering multiple bikes that might look similar on paper.
And, as always, BLISTER+ Members can send us an email to get personalized recommendations and feedback on which bike (or parts upgrade, or setup tweak, or whatever else) will be the best fit for you.
Blister Spectrums
Each bike section concludes with our Blister Spectrums — where we rank each bike in the section against every other bike in the section on a specific criterion (e.g., pedaling efficiency, stability, etc.) to help you home in on a few bikes that best match what you’re looking for.
What’s Not in This Guide
What you won’t find in our guide is equally important: ads from bike companies.
We don’t accept advertisements from brands that we review, and never have. You can trust that our reviews are our unfiltered views on any given product, period.
Our Other Bike Guide: The ‘Blister Guide to Buying a Mountain Bike’
The prior iteration of our Mountain Bike Buyer’s Guide will also live on, with a rebrand to ‘Blister Guide to Buying a Mountain Bike’ — and it remains as relevant as ever.
Mountain bikes are complex and expensive, with a ton of jargon used to describe and characterize them, and a host of factors to consider when shopping for one. The Blister Guide to Buying a Mountain Bike lays out everything you need to know, from basic terminology to advanced concepts.
Armed with that information, you’ll be in a better place to know what to look for, what questions to ask, and how to start your search. And that’s where our Mountain Bike Buyer’s Guide comes in.
How This Guide is Organized
We’ve organized this guide into sections based on categories of bikes, and we’ll be rolling out those sections sequentially, starting with All-Mountain bikes now, with more to follow soon. We have published a full review of nearly every bike in this guide, with links to those reviews and, when applicable, the ‘Deep Dive’ accompanying each bike in the guide.
Since the boundaries between classes of bikes are highly subjective, we’ll be including certain bikes in multiple categories in instances where a given bike is a relevant comparison to other bikes across different classes. Within a given category, the bikes are organized in ascending order by rear wheel travel; the write-up for each bike includes a description of what the bike does and doesn’t do best, the key figures from its geometry chart for every size, and its important stats, including suspension travel, wheel size, and frame material options.
Prices & Build Specs?
We’ve left pricing and build specs out, both because they change often, and because MSRP often isn’t reflective of what many people actually pay for a given bike. For more details on the build spec reviewed for a given bike, refer to its full review.
And With That…
We hope this Guide helps you identify what you need, what you don’t, and the end result is that you have a great time riding. Cheers.
