Every so often a maker comes along who quietly suggests that the future of a material might be a plant. Erba Cycles is one of those.
From steel to something greener
The workshop was founded by Randall Levrere, a framebuilder from Maine who fell early for the freedom of bikes and the satisfaction of building things with his own two hands. He is no newcomer: Levrere had been brazing steel frames since the 1990s and racing them on the east coast long before he reached for something stranger. That history matters, because it means the turn to bamboo was not a gimmick by someone who didn't know better — it was a deliberate choice by someone who knew steel intimately and went looking for what came next.
Why bamboo
His idea is disarmingly simple: combine bamboo and hemp, both sustainably grown, to grow rather than weld a bicycle into being — everything from stiff race frames to easy city cruisers. The tubes are bamboo; the joints, or lugs, are wrapped and bound with hemp fibre set in resin where another builder would lay a weld. Levrere's argument is technical as much as romantic: bamboo, he points out, is the closest natural cousin to carbon fibre there is — a hollow, fibrous tube with a remarkable strength-to-weight ratio — which makes his frames naturally light and, crucially, good at soaking up road buzz. Each one is handmade in the USA, by him.
The oldest material as the newest
There is something satisfyingly contrarian in this. The bicycle industry spends fortunes engineering exotic composites in distant factories; Levrere points to a grass that grows a metre a day and asks why we bothered. A bamboo frame damps vibration in a way stiff carbon never quite manages, and when its riding life is finally over it does not sit in a landfill for five hundred years. The build is slow, the output is small, and that is the point: these are bicycles made one at a time, by hand, from something that was recently alive.
Reading it again in 2026
More than a decade on, the case Erba was quietly making has only grown louder. “Sustainable” has become a sticker slapped on carbon-heavy products, while the genuinely circular idea — a frame you could almost compost — still lives mostly in small workshops like this one. Erba belongs to the same honest movement as Creme's classic steel and, more broadly, to the larger arc we map in the bicycle as an object of desire — the long swing between the bicycle as fantasy (the fibreglass Spacelander) and the bicycle as conscience. Levrere was never chasing a trend; he was chasing a feeling — the particular calm of a machine made from something that grew. That instinct reads, today, less like nostalgia and more like foresight. Grown, not welded. The phrase still sounds like a manifesto.