Posted on April 6, 2022 by Cory Benson
Sea Otter is set to open tomorrow and blow up our homepage with tons of new bikes & tech, but we got an early sneaky peek today at Moots’ next-gen titanium Forager fat bike. Sporting some huge 27.5 x 4.5″ Terrene Cake Eater tires, this new Moots Forager fat bike is a massive jump for snow, sand & mud mountain bike riders hunting traction in the loosest & slipperiest conditions…
Moots last updated their ti fat bike with the Frosthammer more than 8 years ago, already fat for the time with 4.8-5″ wide tires on 26″ wheels. But a fat bike hasn’t officially been in their line-up since early 2019. Now that many snow bikers have moved to larger 27.5″ wheels for smoother rolling, it was time for Moots to revive the ti fat bike with the fattest 27.5 tires they could find.
Official max tire clearance for the new ti fat bike is 27.5×4.5” on a wide (presumably up to 100mm) rim.
Claimed Forager frame weight is ~3.75lb (~1.7kg). But you are likely to save a bunch of weight over the last generation of Moots fat bikes, as most of the old Frosthammers we had seen either had a steel fork or a suspension fork.
Now Moots has designed their ti Forager for the full carbon ENVE fat fork, with a 44mm headtube & a 1.5″ tapered headset. It doesn’t get suspension-corrected geometry anymore, because Moots says they’ve found that the massive tire does enough work for you already, and they weren’t ever impressed with suspension forks on snow anyway.
The new Forager sticks with pretty standard wide 197mm rear & 150mm front axle thru-axle spacing, but now sizes up to a super-wide 120mm threaded bottom bracket shell to help gets its S-bend chainstays around the massive rear tire. It also retains full-length external cables through guided loops for simplicity, but now adds a larger diameter seatpost for dropper compatibility and modular stealth internal dropper routing. This one sticks with just 2 pairs of regular bottle cage bosses, but it is a Moots, so custom adventure mounts will surely be possible too.
No official word yet on pricing, but it is a titanium mountain bike made by the master bike builders in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. Expect a complete bike like this to start over $8000.
Cory Benson is the EU Tech Editor of Bikerumor.com.
Cory has been writing about mountain bikes, enduro, cyclocross, all-road, gravel bikes & bikepacking on and off for over 25 years, since before several of these even had names in our industry.
Prior to that (and at times, concurrently), Cory worked as an Architect specializing in environmental sustainability, a IBD bike shop designer & consultant, an independent product designer, a bike shop mechanic, and a mountain biking instructor.
Based in the Czech Republic for over 15 years, Cory spends much of his time traveling around Europe, riding bikes, and meeting directly with many of cycling’s key European product developers, industry experts & tastemakers for an in-depth review of what’s new, and what’s coming next. A technical off-road rider at heart since the 1990s, Cory’s cycling has evolved to cover everything from the wide range of riding aero road bikes on dirt roads to thrashing enduro bikes in the European bikeparks & trail centers, with plenty of XC, CX & gravel in between.
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I know a dinosaur who LOVES moots titanium. And also Chipotle
That bike is 100% Dope Ammo!
Sweet Moots! That back tire on backwards??
Good catch! But that may be on purpose. Cake Eaters don’t feature front/rear specific tread. I run my rear CE backwards to get a little more knob surface digging in for that reason.
I want that! I like the camo detail.
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