Restrap Bar Bag Holster & Dry Bag & Food Bag

The Restrap Bar Bag Holster, Dry Bag and new, larger Food Bag are an excellent choice for carrying luggage on your road or mountain bike. On or off-road, this rugged, made-in-the-UK solution is practical, looks good and should last you a lifetime.

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I've already reviewed the matching Restrap Saddle Holster and Top Tube Bag, now it's time to round out the core of the Restrap 'Carry Everything' system with the front luggage options.

Bar Bag Holster

The Restrap Bar Bag Holster is a cunningly simple design: a rectangular plastic core covered with '1000D military-grade Cordura', swathed in nylon webbing to provide the attachment points. The holster attaches to your bar either side of the stem using a simple nylon strap-and-buckle system that fits quickly and holds securely. There's 85mm between the inside edges of the straps, allowing enough space to fit light and computer mounts next to your stem, but the height of the bar bag might require some thinking on light position. My go-to Exposure Joystick and Lezyne PowerDrive XL lights were both too low to see over the top of the Food Bag once attached, making the Plan B of a fork-mounted light a necessity.

Tightening the Holster right up against the bar leaves no room for your fingers to grip the tops if you like to ride there. Fortunately, there's enough slack to drop it down a centimetre or so to leave room without compromising on stability. I found the Holster cleared the front section of my mudguard, but this was on a bike with a fairly tall head tube. If your geometry, stem spacer stack or stem angle makes the bar top-to-fork crown distance smaller than normal you might find clearance of a mudguard, fork crown-mounted light or possibly even the tyre to be close.

I found looping the few centimetres of excess strap forward under the front of the buckle made for a 100 per cent solid Holster position over even the roughest terrain. The Holster sits against your brake and gear cables as they curve around your head tube, which might change where they then contact your frame, so be sure to check and add extra abrasion protection as required.

One unavoidable downside of this design is that the Holster simply cannot be fitted to a drop bar where the cables exit the shifters at the side and not underneath the bar tape. With under-tape cabling now available all the way down to the second-from-bottom Shimano Sora groupset, this isn't a widespread issue. If fitting to a mountain bike there are two simple straps provided to thread through the fork crown or possibly the rear of the bottom of the head tube to aid stability.

Dry Bag

Once the Holster's in place, the optional double-ended Dry Bag (full review here) is easily inserted into it and secured with the two straps, magnetic buckles clipping into place almost of their own accord. These magnetic buckles are genius – useable with the thickest gloves, and never showing the slightest inclination to come adrift. To undo them you slide to the left, and any excess strap can be rolled up and secured with small Velcro tags sewn into the strap ends.

The double-ended opening of the 14-litre Dry Bag makes for easy access while in place – I would often stash and retrieve gloves, headgear and occasionally a jacket without having to remove the bag from the Holster. If you want to realise the full 14-litre capacity there will be little-to-no room left for your hands high up in the drops, even on a wider normal bar. If you are riding a flared drop this will probably not be an issue. I found it was easy to cinch the ends of the Dry Bag inwards, looping the excess Holster buckle strap length through each end of the Dry Bag and attaching them to each other using the Velcro tabs.

With 3kg of kit stashed in the Dry Bag, it didn't move around, there was no noticeable effect on steering once underway, and the whole setup felt solid, if a bit unaerodynamic. If you want to go heavier, Restrap has tested all components to a frankly ridiculous 50kg – possible, but not really to be recommended.

Food Bag

For smaller items needing frequent access, the Food Bag is a £19.99 optional extra that I highly recommend. It's newly redesigned to be larger in capacity and using a different magnetic attachment system than previous models. Restrap wasn't 100 per cent happy with the previous magnetic latches, so updated the design with a cunning bi-directional setup. As with the Dry Bag magnetic buckles, the Food Bag sucks itself onto the Holster when held within about a centimetre, so in the cold and wet, with layers of gloves on, there's no need to disrobe and faff.

The Food Bag can be removed with one hand by firmly pulling the left-hand side towards you, then pulling to the left. The combination of magnets and the 90-degree two-step process make an unintended bag ejection nigh-on impossible; I gave the setup a jolly good thrashing and couldn't get a fully loaded Food Bag to dislodge.

Measuring a conservative 20x13x5cm internally, that's 1.3 litres of accessory or foodie goodness to stash. I was able to store a 22cm-long Birzman mini-pump, tool roll and inner tube and still have room for a few other bits and pieces. The zip is a waterproof YKK, and the 1000D Cordura construction affords protection and decent water resistance, though not waterproofness – so delicate electronics will need protecting in heavy rain.

Restrap needs to fine-tune the zip garage to completely remove annoying rattles – I looped the zip pull-tag around the orange paracord to keep things whisper-quiet. The great thing about a company like Restrap is that it can and does innovate quickly based on rider feedback, so this is likely to be sorted soon.

The paracord zig-zag on the top of the Food Bag is handy for holding thick gloves when labouring up long, warm climbs and you could probably fit a small rolled jacket under there too. The front of the Holster has a small loop through which you push the Food Bag's paracord tension buckle, to hold the front of the Food Bag down against the Holster to prevent it bouncing around.

Conclusion

With the new improved Food Bag topping a well-thought-out design made from super-strong materials, there really isn't anything to fault on the Restrap Bar Bag Holster/Dry Bag/Food Bag ensemble. For £85 total you get a system that will quickly fit pretty much any modern bike, carry as much kit as you'd really want up front short of using proper panniers, and will no doubt last you many, many adventures on and off the road.

> Beginner's guide to carrying stuff on your bike

Even a cursory glance at the handlebar-mounted touring/bikepacking luggage category reveals many, many dozens of brands offering all manner of variants on bike attachment, luggage fixing, protection and material technology. There's no 'right' or 'wrong' way to do this, just what works on your bike, for your style and duration of riding. The Restrap Bar Bag Holster, Dry Bag and Food Bag combination is a worthy addition to the genre: mid-range in price, not lightweight relative to some others, but designed to survive the toughest of challenges.

Verdict

Rugged, practical, easily mounted and made in the UK – a great choice for bikepacking/touring