Modelo Especial is now the top-selling beer in the United States, having taken the crown from the beleaguered Bud Light. Modelo surpassed Bud in sales through retail stores in both May and June of this year.
For those not paying close attention to the beer industry, Modelo, which is owned by Constellation Brands, becoming America’s favorite beer may seem a bit surprising. It shouldn’t be — the brand’s growth is part of some ongoing shifts in the sector overall.
The recent backlash against Bud Light over its marketing deal with a transgender influencer (and general anger at the beers going woke) may have sped things up a little bit, but experts say this was likely to happen sooner or later, regardless. Well before the Bud Light boycott, the brand had been experiencing multi-year declines. Meanwhile, Modelo was posting consistent growth. Eventually, it was able to catch up to and surpass Bud Light in store retail sales.
There’s a new king — or, rather, rey — of beers
“This was an inevitable thing to happen. Modelo was going to become the No. 1 beer in the country, full stop,” said Bryan Roth, an analyst for Feel Goods Company, a beverage brands studio, and editor of its newsletter, Sightlines+. “This was a story already written, and Bud Light just happened to have this controversy come up this year, which hastened getting to this chapter of the story.”
Now, there’s a new king — or, rather, rey — of beers.
Demographics is destiny, but for beer
A decade ago, Modelo wasn’t even a top-10 beer, but it has climbed up the ranks. In 2018, Modelo was America’s seventh-top beer in chain retail by dollars. By the beginning of this year, it was second.
A combination of factors have propelled Modelo forward in recent years, said Garrett Nelson, vice-president and senior equity analyst at CFRA Research, in an email, including “the growing popularity of imported beer brands, demographic changes, Constellation’s capacity growth to meet the demand, and most recently, the demise of Bud Light.”
As more Latino and Hispanic drinkers have reached legal drinking age, their preferences have shifted the overall mix of beer that’s selling in the United States. The country’s growing Hispanic population has boosted Modelo’s growth.
“The Modelo brand over-indexes to un-acculturated Hispanic consumers,” said Vivien Azer, a senior research analyst at Cowen, noting that in 2016 the company said 3 points of its revenue algorithm just comes from growth of the Hispanic population in the US. The Wall Street Journal points out that 70 percent of Modelo’s consumers were Hispanic in its 2019 fiscal year.
It’s also taken off with non-Hispanic consumers, which Constellation told WSJ now represent 45 percent of its base. The website Good Beer Hunting points out that more non-Hispanic households purchase Modelo than Hispanic households, but Hispanics consume more Modelo by volume than non-Hispanics.
Modelo is the top brand in California and in the Chicago, Dallas, and Baltimore metropolitan areas. Mexican import beers, specifically, have done well in recent years, while imports from other countries have not. As the New York Times notes, Mexican beer imports to the US doubled from 2013 to 2022, while imports from everywhere else declined.
“For whatever reason, American drinkers really associate Mexican import lagers with beach season, with sort of affordable luxury, with an attractive, active lifestyle, so they get a little bit of a halo there,” said Dave Infante, a beer columnist for VinePair and the publisher of the drinks newsletter Fingers. “There’s some powerful, broad, multi-decade-long trends that are wind at the back of a brand like Modelo, and Constellation has, for the most part, done a good job of making sure they don’t [mess] it up and let it continue to cook and mount in popularity.”
“You hear people say a lot in this industry that no one wants to drink the same beer as their dad did”
Corona, which is owned by Grupo Modelo, was bigger in the US for much longer and has less novelty with drinkers in the US, Infante said. Modelo also plays better in cans, which consumers prefer when they’re picking up from a store.
Modelo does have a higher price point than beers such as Bud Light, and its success is part of a broader trend of consumers trading up for more expensive brands and a sort of premiumization in the alcohol space emphasizing quality.
Young drinkers are on the hunt for something new, too, which some seem to have found in Modelo. “You hear people say a lot in this industry that no one wants to drink the same beer as their dad did,” Infante said. “It’s cliché because it’s broadly true.”
This one stings for AB InBev
The path to Modelo landing in Constellation Brands’ lap runs through Anheuser-Busch InBev, the company that owns Bud Light.
In 2012, AB InBev decided it wanted to acquire Grupo Modelo, which makes Modelo and Corona, among other brands, in a $20 billion deal. The Department of Justice moved to block the merger, saying it would harm competition and potentially lead to higher prices. Eventually, the parties reached an agreement to let the acquisition go through. It required AB InBev to offload its Modelo business in the US to someone else. That’s how Constellation Brands, a relatively small wine and spirits company at the time, took the reins.
It’s hard to play out counterfactuals, but Modelo’s growth may not have happened had it remained in the AB InBev portfolio instead of landing in Constellation’s, Roth said. “This was a company that was known for wine and spirits, Arbor Mists and wine coolers and Svedka vodka. And when they got access to the Mexican beer imports with Corona and Modelo, that put something in their portfolio that they hadn’t had before but also gave them the opportunity to focus on something unique in the American beer space and put attention on in a way that others couldn’t,” he said.
Under the AB InBev umbrella, Modelo and Corona just would have been two other beers. At Constellation, they’re something special.
Modelo started running English-language ads in 2015. The brand inked a deal to become the official beer of the UFC in 2017, replacing Bud Light, and it spread its wings from there. “These were brands, Modelo especially, that got a lot of attention from Constellation Brands — it had the financial might behind it to make these partnerships and promotions happen,” Roth said.
If you are Bud Light, you are not having a nice time right now
Modelo’s gain isn’t really Bud Light’s loss, per se. The different prices likely mean other beers have picked up a little more steam as a result of Bud’s struggles. “It actually seems to be the case that it’s Miller Light, Coors Light, Pabst, and Yuengling that are picking up share from the Bud Light boycott,” Azer said.
Things are not looking great at Bud Light at the moment or for AB InBev more broadly, even if they’re not dire.
The fallout from the controversy over Bud Light’s marketing partnership with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney has had long-lasting ripple effects. In its most recent earnings report, the company said its sales and profits fell in the US in the second quarter. It was a result of lost market share and having to spend more on marketing and supporting distributors inadvertently impacted by the Bud Light boycott. AB InBev’s earnings did beat expectations, though, and the company said it did a survey of consumers in the quarter showing 80 percent of people are favorable or neutral on Bud Light the brand.
Bud Light was on the decline long before the Dylan Mulvaney dust-up, and the company has problems beyond that. Infante said that efforts to make Bud Light Next, a zero-carb beer, a thing over the past year have flopped. “It’s basically a non-factor in the company’s overall portfolio,” he said. It’s an issue that likely adds some salt to distributors’ current wounds.
AB InBev, which recently announced corporate layoffs, does seem to want to steer clear of anything potentially controversial at the moment. “People want to enjoy their beer without the debate,” Michel Doukeris, the chief executive of Anheuser-Busch, said on the company’s earnings call. AB InBev is going to be focusing on marketing its beers through sports leagues and organizations that back military families and farmers, he noted, apparently leaning into arenas it hopes will be viewed as non-problematic.
“Before the controversy, Bud Light had 14 percent of beer sold in chain retail, and they are now hovering just over 10 percent, so they’ve lost, effectively, 4 percent share of all beer sold by volume,” Roth said. It’s now plateaued, which signals both that the worst is likely over and that it will be a challenge to gain back any ground they’ve given up. “Can they pick up what they’ve lost?” Roth said. “With a certain section of customers, the answer is clearly no.”
“Consumers that have opted to leave the Bud Light franchise have likely left the franchise permanently”
Azer said that even Bud Light’s offer of a $15 rebate on purchases around the Fourth of July fell flat. “Consumers that have opted to leave the Bud Light franchise have likely left the franchise permanently,” she said.
In an email to Vox, an Anheuser-Busch spokesperson said its portfolio continues to be the leader of the beer category as the No. 1 brewer and pointed to the strength of the company’s on-premise draft sales, meaning at a bar or restaurant, for both Michelob Ultra and Bud Light. They said, year-to-date, Bud Light remains the top beer brand in the country for on-premise tracking in dollars and volume.
The future of beer is maybe nobody gets to be king of beer
It’s hard to know where the beer industry is headed next, whether it be Modelo or Bud Light or the entire sector.
Roth said he thinks it’s possible and even likely that Michelob Ultra, which is made by AB InBev and seen as a sort of healthier beer option, soon takes the No. 2 spot in beers, which would push Bud Light to third. Beer sales more broadly in the US are on the decline anyway. Beer companies need to find new ways to market their brands to different consumers and run the risk of stepping on a bear trap in doing so. That’s sort of how Bud Light wound up in its current predicament in the first place.
Infante thinks the era of one beer being able to be all things to all people is over, at least for now — companies have to stay in a lane and can’t really cast a wide net. “We won’t see another Bud Light-type product, I don’t think, again in this category for another couple decades-cycle at least,” he said. “If that type of all-market product is ever going to return, it will in the future, but it won’t for the moment.”
CHICO — A 28-year-old Chico man is in custody after officers from the Chico Police Department used a drone to catch him.
Police detectives arrested Benjamin Miranda at around 5:30 p.m. Friday near the intersection of East Third and Wall streets. According to police, Miranda had a history of weapons use and was wanted on a parole violation from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
As officers approached Miranda, he ran away, fleeing through an open business. Several officers arrived in the area to assist in the search, while Miranda hid in the patio area of the business he entered. Police asked the business’ patrons and staff to “shelter in place” while officers searched for Miranda, using a police drone.
Police used the drone to search, found him in the business’ patio area and began to transmit verbal directions by way of the drone’s loudspeaker. Miranda complied, allowing officers to arrest him without further incident.
According to a press release, police officials said this incident highlighted how technology has helped to de-escalate situations, improve officer and community safety, and decrease the amount of staff time spent on these types of incidents.
For many people, myself included, coffee is a daily ritual: Wake up. Measure. Grind. Brew. Only then does the day begin. But it’s not a ritual that everyone loves. Making coffee takes time, and too much (or too little) caffeine can leave you with headaches, jitters, and an inability to concentrate. Though I don’t personally suffer from caffeine withdrawal, on rare occasions I do slip past my tolerance level, and the effects are almost worse than a hangover.
Peloton is the new Tae Bo is the new Thighmaster. Why do we approach fitness as consumers?
When Tae Bo was all the rage in the late 1990s, Amanda Biers Melcher dove in head first. Living in LA, she says she’s tried “all of the workouts” — cardio barre, Bikram yoga when it was the (literally) hot thing, etc. But there was something special about the martial arts-inspired cardio fitness craze.
Biers Melcher was part of star instructor Billy Blanks’ “cult-like following” who worked out at a Sherman Oaks studio — now a Chipotle — alongside A-listers like Brooke Shields, Reese Witherspoon, and Magic Johnson, even appearing in one of the workout videos. The day she and a friend — both new moms — showed up for a class taping they’d been invited to, some of the excitement wore off. “We gave our names to the young woman with a clipboard and she said, ‘Oh, good, the alternative body types are here,’” she says, recalling that her friend burst out crying when they realized what was going on. “We were the fat girls in the video.”
Despite the embarrassing mishap, Biers Melcher stayed loyal to the workout ... until she didn’t. Looking back, she’s not quite sure why she stopped going — at some point, the fad just sort of faded. “A lot of people just moved on,” she says. “Everyone does what’s hot, then something else becomes hot, and everyone does that.”
Like millions of people, Biers Melcher gave up significant portions of her time, energy, and maybe a little bit of dignity for a workout that she did really enjoy. And then, also like millions of people, she was on to the next thing.
Billy Blanks is still around, and you can still find people doing Tae Bo. But it’s nowhere near as prevalent as it once was. That’s the thing about fitness trends: They constantly ebb and flow, often by design. Fitness is not inherently a consumer endeavor, but we tend to approach it as one. The health and wellness industry is more than happy to oblige.
“Fitness is experienced in this country mostly as a consumer product, so the rules of the markets apply to exercise almost more than the rules of science or health,” Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, a fitness historian, professor at the New School, and author of the upcoming bookFit Nation. “There is this constant cycle of exercise trends mostly because there’s the need to keep creating new products and flashy experiences for people to spend money on.”
Fitness is not inherently a consumer endeavor, but we tend to approach it as one
There’s always something that’s in vogue (like Peloton six months ago, and SoulCycle a little before that, and CrossFit a little before that), and there’s always something that’s going to replace it, just like in fashion, said Rina Raphael, a health and wellness writer and author of the upcoming book The Gospel of Wellness. “There’s no money in telling people to go for a walk, right?”
Fitness science changes, just not as fast as fads
There are shifts in fitness governed by breakthroughs in exercise science, but those shifts are generally slow, Mehlman Petrzela explained. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, cardio and aerobics were embraced as a type of exercise that everyone could do. Then in the 1990s, there was a shift to strength as good for general health, and away from worrying that strength training would make you “muscle bound.” In the last 20 years, there’s been more research on mindfulness and meditation. “You see a lot of exercise programs incorporating that broader wellness perspective,” she said.
The pace at which exercise science evolves is, to say the least, much slower than the pace at which different practices evolve. There’s a difference between how exercise trends are driven by science compared to the capitalistic drive to repackage and resell.
If the point of your workout is to get in cardiovascular activity, the kind of workout that you’re ultimately doing isn’t all that different, whether you’re running on a treadmill or dancing around in a studio. If you’re trying to do low-impact strength, barre and Pilates aren’t lightyears apart. “It’s not so much a different exercise modality that’s being sold to you as much as it is a different way of doing it or a different package,” Mehlman Petrzela said.
Workout companies and fitness studios are constantly competing for business with all sorts of gimmicks and tricks to draw people in. I am a bit of a sucker for these types of things and have tried my fair share of fad workouts. For a while, I tried Mark Fisher Fitness, a queer-friendly boutique studio in New York that calls its members “ninjas” and is adorned with unicorn memorabilia. I once did a dance fitness class where you put on headphones and rocked out to terrible European dance music in front of the New York Public Library, pretending the experience wasn’t completely humiliating. Another time, I did a spin bootcamp class that was so hard to follow I wanted to walk out, except another guy did first. I tried CrossFit for a week and almost immediately got hurt.
“In this very, very crowded marketplace, you need to sell a different experience or a different packaging,” Mehlman Petrzela said. Sometimes we’re trying the new thing because we’re being marketed to and not because it’s actually different or good or advisable. But it’s not inherently a bad thing, she noted — people like different things for different reasons.
“There’s a whole bunch of group fitness trends that always cycle through”
People have all sorts of different motivations for quitting an exercise program: They get bored and look for something else, or find that certain workouts aren’t sustainable over a long period of time, physically or psychologically. I spoke to one man for this story who started running in those five-finger toe shoes for a while until he stepped on a rock, resulting in an injury it took him eight months to shake. I spoke to another woman who got into doing workout videos based on one of those mini trampolines but had to give it up after moving to an apartment building where her downstairs neighbor didn’t exactly appreciate her bouncing around every morning.
“There’s a whole bunch of group fitness trends that always cycle through. They fall out of favor for different reasons,” Raphael said.
Peloton is not dead, it’s just not going to be the big thing forever
So I guess this brings us to the Peloton of it all, arguably the last Big Hot Thing in exercise. The connected fitness company was well poised to take off at the outset of the pandemic, when many gyms shut down and people needed options to exercise from home. Consumers wanting a bike or treadmill faced months of back orders, and Peloton’s market cap surpassed $50 billion. But like so many fitness companies before it (not to mention spinning competitors Flywheel and SoulCycle), Peloton’s star has started to fade. It reported a $1.2 billion loss in its recent quarterly report, though it still has nearly 3 million subscribers.
“We have yet to see Peloton evaporate as a company, what we are seeing is it’s evaporating as a perceived mega-cap changing the world,” said Simeon Siegel, an analyst at BMO Capital Markets.
Peloton remains popular among many of its users, and it remains a nearly $4 billion company. Still, it is nowhere near the breakout story it was viewed as just a couple of years ago. As Vox has documented in the past, investors have begun to sour on the company, which has faced challenges in manufacturing and logistics. People just aren’t going to buy limitless amounts of treadmills and bikes. And like so many fitness trends before, there’s nothing particularly special about what the Peloton bikes and treadmills do in the first place.
“What Peloton did so well was less creating a truly innovative product and more telling a truly compelling story,” Siegel said. Essentially, Peloton’s success has been in its community much more than in its engineers. “The rise and fall of Peloton has been written by storytellers much more than it’s been written by numbers.”
Even when they fade from the limelight, most exercise trends truly never go away. “There are still people around doing almost all of these programs except the ones that are total scams that get disproven,” said Mehlman Petrzela. (See: those vibrating ab belts, though there are people probably using those, too.)
Maybe not many people are doing Tae Bo anymore, but they are doing classes that incorporate boxing. Heck, you can still find some Tae Bo classes on YouTube. Biers Melcher is well aware of the Peloton trend, but she insists that Tae Bo was different. “It lacks the kind of star power, I think, or communal star power of Tae Bo,” she says. “Every class was like a rock concert.”
There’s no such thing as an exercise trend that lasts forever
The same can be said of Peloton. A recent ride with the singer Lizzo crashed the app, so many people tried to join. Some of its instructors, including Cody Rigsby and Robin Arzón, are celebrities in their own right, much like Billy Blanks was 20 years ago. SoulCycle, which lost some of its sheen during the pandemic, generated a cult-like following that had its followers clamoring for bikes at its ultra-exclusive studios. Some fitness programs have managed to become almost a religion for their adherents.
There’s no such thing as an exercise trend that lasts forever, except for maybe running and walking, but again, beyond selling you shoes and smartwatches, there’s not a whole lot of money to be made off of those. And really, who among us doesn’t have at least one piece of long-abandoned fitness equipment sitting somewhere in our garages or basements or closets?
There’s no harm in trying a new thing, even if it’s expensive (as long as you can afford it), and hey, maybe you might like it. Indeed, experts say that whatever the latest fashion in fitness is, what’s most important is finding the one that works for you, because that’s the one that has a chance of sticking, or at least being the most effective for now. As Raphael puts it, “Find something you really like.”
We live in a world that’s constantly trying to sucker us and trick us, where we’re always surrounded by scams big and small. It can feel impossible to navigate. Every two weeks, join Emily Stewart to look at all the little ways our economic systems control and manipulate the average person. Welcome to The Big Squeeze.
This couple wanted forks panted to match - that is a fairly common request but they went a little further than most.These frames are adorned with custom ordered Jen Green badges. These badges are not the ones normally seen on my bikes but one-off customer designed and unique.
The two badges are not the same and actually arrived at the shop about a month apart. I only got the one on the left the day before these frames were to be picked up ! This husband-and-wife pair of frames are being built up at the Bicycle Outfitter in Los Altos, Calif. This venerable shop was well established before I built my first frame in 1978 so these frames are in experienced hands. I hope the mechanic isn't too upset at how tight I put the right side down tube gear cable adjuster-I wanted it to be welded onto the gusset, rather than the down tube itself to reduce stress on a very high-stress part of the frame.
You can see the adjuster in this photo. The frames are made for flat mount brakes and both have internal down-tube rear brake line routing.The blue frame is larger and has the newer logo. The wife's frame was too small for the newer logo so it has the classic logo-both are in gold.I put on gold seat collars to compliment the decals. I ran out of gold signature logos so I just hand-signed the frames with a gold paint pen the way I did when I was too broke to have decals decades ago.
Fabio Aru’s Italian champion jersey lasted one day. After finishing 2017 in the Italian flag he was unveiled on the 1 January in a jersey that had the smallest hint of Italian design. This caused some outrage and mockery on social media; and serious enquiries too. The result was that the jersey has been changed. With this in mind why do teams seem to offer such different versions of these jerseys and what, if any, are the rules surrounding their design?
Fabio Aru’s jersey displayed the Italian tricolore around the belly, or at least it displayed the green, white and red we associate with the Italian flag. That flag is made up of vertical bands while Aru’s jersey had horizontal bands which was closer to the Iranian flag than anything else, rather ironic given the UAE is at war in Yemen by proxy with Iran.
Aru’s now sporting a new jersey. Perhaps the timing has played a part because if this was unveiled after the national championships in June and he started riding the Tour de France everyone’s attention would be on the race and the jersey would quickly become established. At least this is what happens when a Movistar wins and gets a jersey which appears to have as little yellow and red as possible. Whatever the reason the team backed down, a reminder this is still the Lampre team of recent times. The presence of a big blue chip sponsor in Emirates, a large airline, can take us away from what is still a family business managed by the Saronni family rather than the professional marketing department of a global brand. This helps explain why the team dropped their Twitter account that still has 75,000 followers to launch a new one that a year later has only a tenth; and when the team landed Emirates didn’t change the name. Similarly Dan Martin joined thinking he’d be leader for the Tour de France only to read this may not be happening as team management make noises about backing Fabio Aru for the Tour too.
Ultimately who pays the piper calls the tune and the sponsors get kit designed in their image. Essentially the kit is a form of uniform and at presumably at UAE Emirates, a team backed by a nation, they want their identity and not that of a another country. All big brands have “style guides” setting out the font used, the exact Pantone colours of the logo and much more, often the rules can run to many pages but the idea is simple, to ensure the same, consistent branding. Imagine if Fabio Aru wins a summit finish, this is valuable publicity and the sponsors want their logos on display, not some alternative blend with the Italian flag. It holds true for all jerseys, BMC Racing have gone from the strong red and black look to something resembling a harlequin’s pyjamas thanks to sponsorship from Tag Heueur, a watchmaker, and new for 2018, Sophos, a software company.
There are rules… but they’re not what you might think. As the screengrab above shows the UCI’s rules refer to where the sponsor logos go, the prominence of the national flag is not mentioned. They also say the national federation has to approve but that’s it, effectively the local federation get a veto but how often would a federation say no to their flagship World Tour team? Also the pro teams can point to precedents and other teams such as Movistar’s discreet versions or Astana’s jersey for Nibali.
One solution here could be to have some common UCI rules. Teams have to live with the rules on the design of the world champion’s jersey and also rules for continental confederations which is why Aru got a “lite” jersey and European champion Alexander Kristoff gets a full white outfit. Applying similar common standards to national teams could make sense but the whole point of the UCI is that it is a union of federations and so each federation will want their own design. Besides it’s not so simple to have a common standard given different flags with their bands, stripes, crosses and motifs.
Not all pro teams see a disinctive jersey as a problem. FDJ seem particularly proud of it and see how the jerseys of Arnaud Démare and Ramon Sinkeldam are basically flags with sleeves. Team manager Marc Madiot makes a point out of keeping the jersey free from the big sponsor logos. But this is in part because FDJ has been a very French team and so the maillot tricolore has been a target for the team, both as a race and as a marketing tool for their French audience as opposed to something won by a lone rider in a more esoteric national championships.
All this confuses many onlookers. Is a national championship a prestigious win or a burden for the team. The answer is it’s what we want it to be, or rather it’s up to the teams to signal what they make of it. But there seems to be a trend for teams to downplay the national flag as corporate branding seems ever more important.
But how much should we celebrate the national jerseys? After all one of the peloton’s charms is its internationalism, here is a sport where you can root for a team without having to pick a country. But the national champion’s jersey doesn’t seem boastful or representative, it’s an attempt to promote one nation ahead of the others. If anything it’s the opposite, only one rider per country wear it. So it doesn’t seem to be a refuge for patriotic scoundrels, just a symbolic icon.
Conclusion
Teams design their jerseys and this includes those for any reigning national champions. Sponsors often want a uniform look to match their brand guidelines and national designs can get in the way. The UCI has next to no rules here, instead it’s up to each federation to approve the design and so is local and variable which can be confusing.
The versatile midfielder is enjoying his time with the Reds.
While Jürgen Klopp has made substantial squad changes in his time at Liverpool, the moves have not seemed to disrupt the team's chemistry. Instead, new players have have only helped push the club forward.
Georginio Wijnaldum, one of the Reds' major summer signings, said the "really fun" atmosphere around the team right now that has helped him perform better.
"Because we are winning a lot of games, it gives us a lot of confidence and we enjoy football more," Wijnaldum said (via Sky Sports). "If you don't win games, it's difficult to enjoy and see the fun in football. I work with a good manager and my teammates are good, quality players. That makes me a better player."
The midfielder added that the intensity Klopp has brought to training has helped foster a hardworking culture around the club. That has also helped Liverpool surpass expectations to this point in the season.
"If everyone trains 100 percent and we all just do our best, that makes us each a better player," Wijnaldum said. "Every training exercise we do is like a real game. Everyone has to be 100 percent, and if it's not 100 percent you will see. I'm just happy that I can be part of this team."
A dominant performance against Turkey has the reigning champions on top, while Northern Ireland make a big climb on the back of beating Ukraine
By some distance, the best performance at the championship so far – no matter how willingly Turkey appeared to roll over and take a pummelling. The third goal was a beauty, even if Jordi Alba was a yard offside before teeing up Álvaro Morata. The move involved all outfield players apart from Gerard Piqué, and featured 21 passes. Same old Spain, then. Yet there was also a lingering sense that they can raise their game to another level. They toyed with Turkey for long spells and it does not bode well for the rest that Andrés Iniesta is on form, their oft (and incorrectly) criticised defence has barely allowed an opportunity, and Jordi Alba and Juanfran are insatiable at wing-back.
This couple wanted forks panted to match - that is a fairly common request but they went a little further than most.These frames are adorned with custom ordered Jen Green badges. These badges are not the ones normally seen on my bikes but one-off customer designed and unique.
The two badges are not the same and actually arrived at the shop about a month apart. I only got the one on the left the day before these frames were to be picked up ! This husband-and-wife pair of frames are being built up at the Bicycle Outfitter in Los Altos, Calif. This venerable shop was well established before I built my first frame in 1978 so these frames are in experienced hands. I hope the mechanic isn't too upset at how tight I put the right side down tube gear cable adjuster-I wanted it to be welded onto the gusset, rather than the down tube itself to reduce stress on a very high-stress part of the frame.
You can see the adjuster in this photo. The frames are made for flat mount brakes and both have internal down-tube rear brake line routing.The blue frame is larger and has the newer logo. The wife's frame was too small for the newer logo so it has the classic logo-both are in gold.I put on gold seat collars to compliment the decals. I ran out of gold signature logos so I just hand-signed the frames with a gold paint pen the way I did when I was too broke to have decals decades ago.
de @ArnaudDemare
de @RSinkeldam
The peloton’s leadout train which will stand out the most
pic.twitter.com/oAdMH5NEqF
