Peaty’s Bicycle Brush Set

Peaty's Bicycle Brush Set comprises bike-specific brushes aimed at improving the way you clean your bike. Their beechwood construction and bristles made from post-consumer recycled plastic give them decent eco credentials, and they look fantastic. Each brush has a specific purpose, and on the whole the set works very well – a worthy upgrade over other bike brushes I've come across, though it is a relatively pricey alternative. The tyre brush could be slightly better, too.

The kit comes with four brushes – the aptly named Bog Brush (because, well, look at it), Detail Brush, Drivetrain Brush, and Tyre Brush. All four cover a variety of cleaning tasks, though if you only want specific brushes they're available individually. Buying it as a kit does reap a saving of £4.97 over buying them all separately.

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As well as being made from beechwood, each brush is also wax coated for durability. The Peaty's logo is engraved into the handle, and a small hole means you could hang each brush up on a hook, if you wanted to.

Let's look at each brush and see what they offer individually.

Bog Brush

Though it might look like something you could scrub your toilet with, it wouldn't be of much use – the bristles on the Bog Brush are really rather soft. Not so good for the lavatory, but a good thing for your bike as it means there's less chance of scratching the paint or components. The brush is designed for cleaning the majority of your bike, helping you to get into all the bigger nooks and crannies without much effort, and thanks to the 360-degree bristles, you get excellent coverage.

The handle is long and chunky, offering excellent grip. In just a couple of minutes, you can pretty much clean your entire bike – at least the parts you can get to. Because the brush is quite sizeable, there are areas you won't be able to reach, which is where the Detail Brush comes into play.

I used the brush on three of my bikes, two of which have pretty bombproof matt paint, and the third is unpainted titanium, but if your bike has paint that you're trying to keep absolutely pristine then you might want to err on the side of caution and use a supersoft microfibre cloth or mitt.

Detail Brush

The Detail Brush allows you to get to parts of the bike that the Bog Brush can't. It features a long and narrow bristle section, meaning you can reach into even the deepest crevices.

The bristles aren't the softest, so you'll want to steer clear of your paint, though the soft cotton tip means you can spot-clean areas without worry. The cotton tip also prevents the wire core – which is already plastic coated – from scratching any part of your bike.

It's an excellent piece to use around the bottom bracket, for getting to dirty hubs, and for under the seat.

Drivetrain Brush

Peaty's Drivetrain Brush is an intriguing design, and one that I've not seen before. It's made to clean both your cassette and chain, with stiff bristles that are longer at the edges to get into all the gaps in the cassette, with a shorter inner channel that allows you to run your chain through it to get a 180-degree clean. The angled handle helps prevent your precious knuckles getting hit by the cassette while you clean.

In practice, I found this works well, enabling me to get in deep to areas of the cassette without risk of getting hurt. That said, because the brush head is designed to be held parallel to the cassette sprockets, you don't get quite as much coverage compared with holding it perpendicular to the cassette, which you aren't able to do with the Drivetrain Brush because of the angled handle. Peaty's way is still fine, it just takes a bit longer and I found it a bit less intuitive. You may prefer this approach, though.

The shorter bristles are effective at scrubbing either top or bottom of the chain, but I found the channel just a little too wide, meaning that the outer bristles don't quite hug the edges of the chain for maximum cleaning effectiveness – this is on a regular 11-speed chain. I've a generic motorcycle chain cleaning brush that has the bristles angled inwards, to help agitate the edges of the chain as you're scrubbing – Peaty's could possible modify the design in this way to make it more effective overall, though I wonder if that might compromise its ability to penetrate the sprockets in the cassette.

One other slight downside, and it's an aesthetic one, is that after one chain clean – admittedly quite an oily one – the lovely looking handle was left looking quite tarnished. It's not a dealbreaker by any means, but it's a shame that the wax coating didn't protect it better in this instance.

Tyre Brush

An often-overlooked part of bike cleaning is scrubbing the tyres. I normally use a generic tyre brush for cars, which works pretty well, but I was interested to see what makes Peaty's any better.

Combined with some all-purpose cleaner, the brush really ate through ingrained dirt. The bristles are quite stiff, for powerful cleaning, and are longer on the edges, with a shorter middle section, enabling you to hold the brush over the centre section and get good coverage.

It's a neat idea, though the brush head isn't really big enough to wrap around the whole tyre and scrub the sidewalls too, which means you need to do several passes. I found this the case on tyres ranging from a reasonably large mountain bike size 2.15in down to a road-friendly 35mm gravel tyre.

I also found I could get my knuckles rapped by the spokes when I wanted to get into the sidewalls, because of the design, as I found it awkward, not to mention uncomfortable on the wrist, to hold it perpendicular to the sidewall.

It's a good idea, but I wonder if overall you might be better served with a simple chunky brush that offers better overall coverage.

Value and conclusion

As a whole, this is a good value set given that you get a wide variety of brushes to cover off every possible scenario when it comes to cleaning your bikes. They're really good quality too, so should last a long time. Bought individually, the brushes would set you back £39.96, so £34.99 for the set saves you a few quid. And if you do prefer to buy specific brushes – which is an option – individually they're not a bad price either.

If you want a set of generic bike brushes made of plastic then take your pick – everyone seems to make them. Muc-Off's 5x Premium Brush Kit is a reasonable alternative, though it doesn't do anything particularly well. It also costs £34.99 but for five brushes, though they're inferior to the Peaty's kit (I've got this kit, too).

Or for just under a tenner there's the Oxford Triple Brush Set. Nothing magical here, but it's probably sufficient for the task.

Overall, unlike any of the other bike cleaning brushes we've covered before on road.cc, the Peaty's set feels like it's clearly been made by bike enthusiasts specifically to improve bike cleaning, even though I don't think they're still not quite perfect in that respect. They're not made out of plastic, and the wood finish means you would probably want to hang these up to show them off, rather than hide them away in a bucket.

Verdict

Clever bike-specific brushes that are pretty eco friendly and look great, though the tyre brush isn't perfect