Colectivo Coffee Custom Bicycle

For those of lucky enough to live here in Milwaukee (no seriously) there is one local business that I feel pretty much defines the cool things that are happening here in this great city.  Colectivo Coffee started off in 1993 and was originally known as Alterra Coffee.  Throughout the years they slowly expanded their presence here in Milwaukee with a combination of hard work, great coffee and super cool coffee shops that were located in the best spots around town.  

This is pretty impressive because during this time cities around the country were being over-run by Starbucks and other national chains and even though Starbucks has a presence here in Milwaukee, Colectivo became the place to get your coffee.  Through a combination of great branding, great product and great service, they eventually garnered enough national attention that their name was purchased by Mars Drinks.

When Mars purchased their name and some of their creative assets, they announced that they weren't going away and that they would re-brand themselves as Colectivo Coffee.  While a lot of locals (including us) wondered if they would pull it off, in what seemed like an overnight transformation they became Colectivo Coffee.  It's funny to think back to the whole re-branding because now I don't even think twice about the fact that it used to be Alterra Coffee. Their product still rules, their branding is spot on and they keep expanding and opening amazing coffee shops all over the Milwaukee metro area.

If you haven't noticed, we're a bit of fond of these guys. So you can only imagine how honored we were when they reached out to us recently to help them build a custom bike! Colectivo was one of the the podium sponsors at this year's Tour of America's Dairyland bike races and they wanted us to build them a Colectivo branded Fyxation bike that would be on display and eventually used as a give-away at the Downer Classic and East Tosa Gran Prix races.

For this project we decided to use our ultra-versatile Quiver frameset as the foundation for the build.  We wanted to build this bike up as a classy single speed cafe cruiser so we used a number of our soon to be released leather goods that we were testing here at the shop, our Alterra cafe bars (guess where we got the name), our bomb proof Session 700 tires and finally a set of Handsome Cycles Mud Butler fenders.  To put the finishing touches on the build we added some Colectivo Coffee graphics and a sweet headbadge using one of their great coffee logos.  

If you're ever in Milwaukee you have to go and get a cup of coffee at Colectivo and see what we're talking about. In the meantime, enjoy a few of pictures we shared below.