[Review] Battle of the Budget Boots Part 2: Meermin Tan Country Calf
This is part two on my series of "budget" boots.
First installment on the LL Bean Suede Hawthorne.
Intro
I fielded some excellent comments on my LL Bean Suede Hawthorne review and more than one user^1,2 brought up Meermin as possibly a superior alternative to the Hawthorne albeit at a slightly higher pricepoint (although you'll have to plunk down nearly 300 USD to get them (220 €-21% Spanish Vat+35 € shipping=~300 USD^3,4 at the current exchange rate. That puts the Meermin Country Calf boot at ~$110 more than the Suede Hawthorne for a USA resident and with some patience you can probably find at least a 10% off LL Bean coupon). So I decided to start this series on budget boots as a guise to purchase more boots. I hope that my initial impressions can provide insight that other reviews have not provided. Frankly a lot of reviews are rather shallow^5,6 and are not substantive relative to what I think I can offer. (No disrespect to The Shoe Snob Blog but that seems like a lazy review.)
For this review I've primarily used 3 pairs of footwear and two tools for direct comparative purposes. From top left to bottom right:
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LL Bean Suede Hawthorne boot,
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Meermin Tan Country Calf boot
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Crockett & Jones for Polo Ralph Lauren (back when C&J made shoes for the Polo line, ~80s-early 2000s) moc pebble blucher (basically a beat to hell C&J Onslow on full Ridgeway as opposed to Dainite). I use the C&J for PRL shoe to compare the pebble leathers to one another. While a beat up older private label C&J model is hardly useful for establishing a leather quality benchmark, it's the only only other pebble leather I've got and I don't think C&J quality has changed in a way that makes this old model somehow obsolete for this purpose. What tannery C&J's pebble leather comes from and whether or not it is the same tannery they sourced from ~20 years ago I couldn't tell you. (I just placed a few PMs to knowledgeable parties, sorry that I am not armed 100% with the information that I would like to be at the time of writing.) This shoe comes into play surprisingly well.
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Cheap Taylor food scale. It gets the job done.
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Calibrated last when exactly? Mitutoyo Dial Calipers. Yes you read that right, .001 inch gradations.
I like to use ounces for masses, and millimeters and inches for lengths. Blame the British.
Product
Meermin Tan Country Calf boot unboxing and initial impression (descriptions in album).
I'll cut to the chase and say that the great thing about Meermin is that they actually give you some surprisingly in-depth specs if you mouse over the light brown text. While Meermin is at least slightly disingenuous as their heelpads are stamped "Made in Spain" when in fact the uppers are constructed and lasted in China and soled in Spain, they are actually pretty transparent about specs where many companies are not. Most notably, they give you the midsole thickness, welt composition, source tanner, and upper leather thickness. I'll come back to this in the leather section.
Details and Defects
For the midsoles and stacked heels they are likely using precut components. That's not a knock or anything, but it can likely account for why the boots were slightly off balance when laid flat in the "Details and Defects" photos and why Meermin feels comfortable stating midsole thickness.
SPI is an interesting topic. You can see from the album that of the 3 shoes primarily used in this review you can see that Meermin has the highest SPI. On the Meermin stitches you can actually see some reddish wax used to secure the rapid stitching. While the Meermin shoe has the highest SPI in this instance, I've had Crockett benchgrade footwear that had consistent 8-9 SPI. SPI is really only a somewhat useful quality indicator for welted footwear. It comes down to time investment more so than actual usefulness however.
Here is what one knowledgeable person on EMF said about SPI:
I should add that for Goodyear-welted shoes, eventually the welt will have to be replaced given enough resolings, and this could be necessary sooner in footwear with tighter stitching since it'll be harder to match the holes. It's not the end of the world since the shoe can eventually be rewelted, and the stitch-count for the sole stitching doesn't have to be the same for the interior welt stitching, so the upper isn't needlessly perforated.
In stitch-down-constructed boots, a high stitch count isn't necessarily a good thing, since the upper has to be stitched through when resoling. Given enough stitches per inch, the upper becomes perforated. It's definitely a difficult balancing act to find the right number of stitches per inch to attach the sole—too many and the upper is ruined after the next resole, too few, and the boot looks like this.
Mass
Nothing truly substantive to bring to the table just handing out information on the mass of the boots, but the Meermin boot weight is basically identical to a beckman (9UK Rui last Meermin, 10.5D Hawthorne, 9.5D Beckman) and the Hawthorne is about 2.5 oz lighter or so.
Leather
I crossed check the listed specs against the boots. The welt is listed as leather, so I performed a very simply "Welt Scratch test". This confirmed that the welt is leather. The stated midsole thickness is 2 mm. Using the calipers I measured no less than 2.8mm (~.110 inches) in midsole thickness. The only place you can just measure the upper leather is at the edge of the tongue where the lining is not present and the tongue is actually a good place to really assess the leather because often times if a company is trying to use inferior sections of the hide they'll try and use it on the tongue. Meermin's stated upper thickness for the leather is 1.5-1.7 mm and I conservatively measured 1.57mm (~.062 inches). You have to be careful not to compress the leather when taking measurements with the calipers. It took a fair bit of practice to minimize the error from reproducibility but I'm pretty confident in my precision and accuracy (I actually have a table of results for different measurements I could provide if anyone is interested in that sort of thing). Very happy to see that if anything Meermin is over-delivering on their stated specs, at least in this instance (extremely small sample size doesn't really provide anything truly conclusive).
The leather is a full grain chrome tanned calfskin from the French tannery Les Tanneries du Puy (French video without English captions). I don't have much to say about the the tannery as I have not done very much digging but the leather is described and supple and soft and I don't wholly disagree but it has some stiffness and dryness in areas like the upper part of the tongue. The quarters do feel great. It's definitely not buttery soft but as far as pebbled leathers go I think it feels quite nice. The Crockett and Jones pebble leather is a bit more supple but it has been conditioned and it has the benefit of being well broken in. The pebble patterns are similar and I wouldn't be surprised to learn if Crockett sourced from du Puy but then again I could be totally wrong. It would be interesting to know if tanneries have unique embossing patterns for their respective pebbled leathers ( I think it is very likely that they do).
I'm not sure why Meermin's insoles always look so battered. It's like there is glue and splitting marks or something that always are present on their insoles when I see pictures of them. Even on their handwelted stuff (where it would be downright silly to split the leather) I've seen similar looking insoles. Also check out that gemming. Not a big deal if you can see just a slight bit of the gemming, basically as long as you can't flip the insole up from the gemming you're fine. I don't recommend trying to pull up your insole though. The insole is actually pretty darn thick so unless Meermin is splitting 9+ iron leather for their insoles that's not split leather. In fact the insole leather looks to be around three times as thick as the pebbled upper leather (measured sans lining of course) so that would put it around 4.5 mm or so. That's like 8-9 irons. That's pretty darn good. I'm impressed. It's easily the thickest insole I've got in my possession right now. I was going to say that Meermin should use a full length insole cover to hide their unsightly insoles but nevermind.
Posted Jul 30, 2014, 4:58 AM UTC