Juice Lubes Dirt Juice Double Pack

Fundamentally, there are two camps in the bike washing world - those who buy bespoke products, and those who reach under the kitchen sink for the green stuff. If you are in the former camp, you like British-made biodegradable products and you don't mind spending a quid or two per cleanup, then the Juice Lubes Dirt Juice Double Pack is a good bet.

If you are a kitchen-cupboard-cleaner kind of cyclist, you'll be able to afford that extra double espresso on the next ride out.

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In the world of cycling there are few subjects around which revolves as much myth, supposition, fervent belief and ardent suspicion as cleaning and degreasing products. Just how exactly do you measure 'clean'? What does 'degreased' actually mean? And what are the variables? Weather, speed, lubricant, previous products, manufacturer coatings, water hardness, type of brush, temperature of water, makeup of local soil type and seasonal bovine diet - all these and more play crucial parts in how any given cleaning product may or may not work.

Into this maintenance maelstrom we enter, attempting to quantify 'cleaning' and 'degreasing' performance.

Double take

The Juice Lubes Dirt Juice Double Pack is - as the name implies - a pack of two halves. A 1L squirty bottle of 'Less Gnarl General Cleaner And Degreaser', and a 1L bottle of 'Super Gnarl Concentrated Citrus Degreaser'. These are actually the same product - the cleaner is simply the degreaser diluted 10:1 in a squirty bottle. Together they retail for £16.99, whereas separately the degreaser is £11.99 and the cleaner £7.99. So you save £3 buying the double. But if you went down the DIY mixing route purchasing two bottles of the degreaser you'd have spent £24 for 1L Degreaser and 11L of Cleaner. That's a saving of over £75 for the effort of mixing 100ml of Degreaser with 900ml of water every time you needed a refill. If you like the stuff, there's a lot of cash to be saved by spending sensibly.

So does it work? Yes. The instructions say to wet your bike down, spray with cleaner, wait two minutes, 'agitating the most stubborn areas with brush or sponge' then rinsing with water. There's no definition of what 'most stubborn areas' entails - in practice I used a soft brush everywhere, it's simply easier to give the whole bike a going over rather than try to mince about deciding which bits to go at or not. For drivetrain areas and wheel arches the grubby brush came out, as usual.

Spraying the cleaner on means inevitable drift, and the odd bit in the face if it's windy. It wasn't unpleasant, but I'd not want to use it as a beauty product. On the Juice Lubes website they demonstrate by spraying the Cleaner direct onto a soft brush, which I found just as effective but makes you wonder about the instruction to leave on for two minutes.

To cover a large-sized road bike frame and rims in cleaner dense enough to work took squirts totalling 143ml - or 1/7th of the bottle. So you get seven washes per bottle of cleaner. Or £1.14 per wash if purchased separately, about 94p when purchased as part of the double pack. Let's call it a quid per wash.

So I put in no more or less effort than cleaning a bike using any other product, and the Juice Lubes product got the bike 'clean'. But critically, how 'clean'?

Answer: as clean as pretty much every other bike cleaning product I've tried, including the bucket du jour, a decent squirt of Fairy Liquid in a few litres of hot tapwater.

Mild green...

I can hear readers limbering fingers over the comments section, poised to rip into this heretical idea - Fairy Liquid containing such quantities of salt as will literally reduce your bike to a rusty exoskeleton overnight. To which I offer the rejoinder that my all-steel Charge Juicer has been washed twice a week every week for three years using hot Fairy and still looks like new - paint chippings aside. And when replacing bottom brackets an inspection of the frame internals shows no reason for concern.

Neat Fairy liquid is also an excellent degreaser, and possibly the only one on the market guaranteed to wash away completely without residue, according to a bloke I spoke to recently who had invested a lot of time in a half-billion-quid-equipped industrial lab doing batteries of tests, only to find out the new super-degreaser his startup had developed and sought to patent was basically Fairy Liquid in chemical composition (more on this guy and his lab in future road.cc reviews).

But let's leave the Fairies under the sink and get on to the next product in question - the 'Super Gnarl' degreaser. I found I needed about 100-150ml of degreaser fluid per effort, to do an entire drivetrain from moderately filthy back to dinner-plate clean - so somewhere between seven and ten degreasing sessions out of a bottle. Again, let's call it a quid per bash.

There was no getting away from it, you still need serious brushwork to dislodge baked-on gunge. It worked well in a chain scrubber as well as direct, applied by a decent stiff brush. The lube/mud gunge it was removing in this case was part Hampshire slurry, part MucOff C3 Ceramic. In the past I've used the weapons-grade Shimano degreaser - but that comes with major health and environmental warnings, and isn't cheap. The Juice Lubes Degreaser worked almost as well, on my mix of lube/mud. YMMV.

Now the blue comments section touchpaper is lit, I'll retire to a safe distance...

Verdict

Yes it gets your bike clean, but it's not the Messiah