100% Brisker Hydromatic Gloves review: Proper winter gloves on a budget?

100% is best known as an eyewear brand, but you’ll see its riding gloves wrapped around an awful lot of handlebars at your local trails in winter. Its Brisker gloves have an attractive combination of keen pricing, warmth, and good bar feel, thanks to a palm that’s barely any thicker than a summer glove. The 100% Brisker Hydromatic adds waterproofing to the mix.

If you ride all year round, decent cold weather gloves are one of those things which can make the difference between enjoyment and endurance. It’s a particular problem in the relatively mild winters we get here in the UK. Often you can find yourself riding in wet conditions, with temperatures that hover just above freezing, and the cold, wind and rain can gang up on you to make the experience very unpleasant indeed. In these conditions warm gloves that also have a decent level of water repellency are a massive bonus.

Feel the glove

First of all, a bit of pre-emptive confusion avoidance, because 100% make several similarly-named gloves with slightly different applications. The Brisker is its lightly insulated winter glove, and the Hydromatic is its waterproof model. And the Brisker Hydromatic aims to combine both into a lightweight, waterproof glove that’ll look after you when temperatures drop.

I’ve already used Brisker gloves for a couple of winters, so the Hydromatic version has a familiar feel, with a few key differences.

The insulation on the backs is a similar thickness to the regular Brisker, and gives your hands a bit of a comedy Michelin Man appearance. The palms however are made of a thicker material, which means slightly less feel, but also seems harder-wearing and more water-resistant than the faux-suede of the regular Brisker.

The cuffs of the gloves are another point of difference. I’m not really a fan of hook-and-loop closures on gloves – they can ladder your nice merino base layers in the washing machine, they make donning and removing gloves more of a faff, and short of a situation where excitable small dogs try and pull them off your hands, I’m struggling to envisage a situation where you need that level of glove security. The neoprene cuffs of the Brisker Hydromatic do a good job of keeping the cold and rain out, but they’re not hard to remove when you need to.

Sizing is more or less as you’d expect. My hands are about 20 cm from the base of my palm to the tip of my middle finger and a large was roomy without being too baggy. The gloves do stretch slightly in use so it’d be worth sizing down if you like a snug fit.

You don’t get as much colour choice with the Brisker Hydromatic as you do for some of the gloves in 100%’s range, but black goes with anything, right? The print on the back of the gloves is also retroreflective, another nice touch given that’ll make your hand signals more visible to other road users in the darker months of the year.

Touchscreen functionality is fairly essential with gloves these days, and the Brisker Hydromatic has this sorted. The thickness of the palms means that using a phone is slightly less easy than usual, but it’s still entirely possible to call, text and upload your Instabangers without having to expose a hand.

On the trail

But enough about the peripheral stuff – how do they actually perform on a cold wet ride?

It’s been a mild, very wet winter here, and most of the time, the Brisker Hydromatic gloves have done a good job. They’re warm enough down to a couple of degrees below freezing, and not too hot for unexpectedly mild days either. For rides on colder days, or if I was prone to chillier hands, I’d want thicker insulation, but they’ve been my go-to gloves pretty much all winter.

The waterproofing is a step above the regular Brisker gloves, and deals well with intermittent showers, but they’ll still wet out in persistent rain. They do dry out quicker than some gloves I’ve used, thanks to sensible material choice. For example, there’s no towelling “snot wipe” panel on the thumb of these, which means they absorb less water.

Compared to full-on winter gloves, they give up very little in terms of feel and dexterity, and they didn’t give me any issues operating gears or dropper posts.

After six months of use, the Brisker Hydromatics are starting to look a bit tired. The printed logos on the backs started to crack and look shabby almost immediately, and some of the material is starting to come away from the tip of one thumb. Functionally, they’re still ok, but I’d happily pay a bit extra for more durable materials.

Overall

It’s possible to spend north of £100 on a pair of winter riding gloves. It’s also possible to make do with a set of disposable latex gloves under your regular pair. The Brisker Hydromatics fall neatly into the middle ground between these options, in terms of price and performance.

They’re ok for warmth and waterproofing, although they wouldn’t be my choice for more extreme weather. And they’re very comfortable and practical in use. For riding in milder, mixed conditions they’re just the job. I just wish they were made to last a bit longer.