Q36.5 Adventure Tech Merino Jersey

The Q36.5 Adventure Tech Merino Jersey is soft and stretchy and good for most UK temperatures you’ll encounter in the short sleeve half of the year. Those sleeves are a little looser than some though, while the give in the fabric can make loaded pockets feel a little more noticeable.

Have you been looking for a three-season jersey that will protect you from ‘the negative impact of naturally occurring electric charges produced by the body during exercise’? Well, great news! The Adventure Tech jersey apparently contains silver threads (1%) for precisely that purpose.

More prosaically, it also comprises polyamide (51%), merino wool (23%), polyester (14%) and elastane (11%). Q36.5 says the material was developed to offer, “the ideal level of thermoregulation in a variety of weather conditions.”

It’s hard to weigh the extent to which the silver meets its heat conduction promises, but merino wool is a good inclusion. It keeps you insulated when it’s chillier, but it’s breathable too. Interestingly both merino wool and silver have anti-bacterial properties that are often claimed to reduce unpleaseant odours in garments made from them, but Q36.5 make no such claims here. The blurb says the jersey is for 18C and above, but even a thin base layer will keep you happy a few degrees below that.

This isn’t the thinnest jersey, but it does still feel pretty airy when the sun breaks through. That airiness is, in part, down to the cut. Q36.5 bills it as, “a more comfortable fit for long hours in the saddle,” for, “less race-oriented and more endurance focused adventures.”

The size guide may recommend a smaller size than you’d ordinarily expect, which means that if you’re sort of between sizes – as I am – you’ll naturally err towards the larger one. I would however advise against that.

I’m more regularly a large these days, according to most brands, but Q36.5’s size guide cautiously recommended a medium. If you enter your measurements, the guide will tell you whether the garment will be a good fit at your waist and chest in a given size, or slightly tight or loose at either.

Personally, I find it difficult to pin my measurements down with laser precision and adding a centimetre to what I submitted tipped me towards a large. Years of experience with cycling gear persuaded me that would be the safer bet. But the Adventure Tech Merino Jersey is indeed a relaxed fit, as billed, and I suspect I might have been better off with the medium after all.

The jersey proved a decent enough fit over my torso – about what you’d expect for one pitched for this kind of relaxed riding – but the arms were looser than any other jersey I own. Baggy would be overstating it, but they don’t sit snug against the skin the way I would ideally want. (Perhaps I’ll be able to tricep dip my way into them over time.)

This element is a slight oddity because the material offers plenty of leeway anyway were the arms cut a little tighter. It is lovely and soft and this stretchiness adds to the comfort. The downside is that it can make the pockets feel a bit weighty if you overload them – although again, a smaller size might mitigate this a little.

The Adventure Jersey supposedly employs “the classic Q36.5 invisible pocket system” which looks decidedly visible to me, what with being a different material to that surrounding it. You get three pockets plus a zip compartment. They sit pretty flat when unloaded, but we’re not talking about some brave new world of pocket technology here.

Value

If it’s pocket innovations you’re after, those on the 7mesh Ashlu Merino Jersey (89 per cent merino) showcase a ‘floating’ design that’s not tethered at the bottom. Patrick felt it worked really well when he tested the jersey for our sister site. At £130, the 7mesh is not much cheaper than Q36.5’s offering and looking at other short sleeve merino jerseys we’ve tested, £150 does seem to be a fairly typical price.

The Isadore Signature Merino Tech Jersey (19 per cent merino) has an RRP of £155, for example, while the latest version of Velocio Men’s Merino LUXE Jersey (71 per cent merino) is £152.

Conclusion

The fabric of the Q36.5 Adventure Tech Merino Jersey is wonderfully soft and the comfort-oriented fit means it doesn’t feel at all constrictive. It’s also good for quite a wide temperature range. As such, it seems a decent choice for longer UK rides, provided your arms aren’t too scrawny and you don’t want to carry too much in the pockets.

Epilogue

In our very first review epilogue, let’s take a moment to reflect and ponder on the amount of merino in a modern ‘merino’ cycling jersey.

Of course, you can buy merino wool cycling jerseys that are 100 per cent merino wool – usually with a slight, or indeed overt, retro vibe. Most performance oriented merino jerseys though are a blend of merino wool and synthetic fibres – usually polyester, elastane and polyamide or some combination thereof for increased breathability, moisture wicking and durability.

Sportwool is probably the best known of these – synonymous with Rapha for many years, though no longer mentioned in its range, with a merino content that typically ranges between 30 and 50 per cent.

Most brands put an emphasis on the technical nature of their chosen merino blend, and what each fibre component brings to the heat and sweat management party. Isadore actually calls its (19 per cent merino) fabric Technical Merino.

From looking at a totally unscientific sample of what we’ve reviewed over the last few years, we’d say the merino content of merino blend cycling jerseys has generally been coming down over time (although there are exceptions – Velocio and 7Mesh above).

Rapha’s Sportwool jerseys used to be 52 per cent merino. The only merino blend jersey in their current range, the Brevet III, is 36 per cent and that’s quite a high merino content compared to some. Whether that trend is due to rising costs, advances in textile technology, or just an evolution of the product to meet the technical demands placed on it is one we’ll leave you to debate in the comments.