Earlier this year, we introduced you to Astral Putters, a company that is approaching putter design like nobody else. If you haven’t read our brand story on Astral, we highly encourage you to do so before going any further. The company’s journey from dream to reality is a compelling example of the power of the entrepreneurial spirit. Today, we dive into Astral Putters themselves. From the components to the fitting approach, we’ll cover it all.
The Astral Story
We aren’t going to rehash Astral’s entire brand story here since we covered it so thoroughly in the article linked above. However, if you’ve already read that it’s worth a quick summary.
Astral’s founder, Blake Callaway, was formerly an attorney with a passion for putter refinishing. Through all his experience working with putters and experimenting on the putting green he came to realize that fitting options available from mass-market equipment manufacturers were not meeting his needs. While he was able to go to the golf store and try dozens of different options, most of these options fit inside a very narrow window and didn’t offer the customization needed for him to maximize his performance.
Blake came to believe that toe hang and shaft offset were the two primary factors in delivering a repeatable square face at impact. However, the particular combination of those two factors that worked best for him, slight toe-hang and minimal offset, was almost impossible to find.
Thus, the idea behind Astral Putters was born; highly customizable putters built from components and a fitting system that allows each person to precisely dial in a putter to their individual stroke. Through consultation with the company’s experts, consumers can put together a putter that not only matches their needs but can be adjusted in the future if anything changes.
The Heads – Astral Putters
We’ll dive into Astra’s fitting system in a moment, but we have to start with the part that most of us look at before anything else – the putter head. Astral offers three different choices, and each one can be dialed in. In other words, consumers can pick the head they desire without any strings attached. Yes, since they are shaped differently, they will offer varying levels of stability and MOI, but the moment of truth (impact) will be the same.
The Blade is the most traditional of the three Astral offerings. This slim and compact head is a classic for a reason. It’s nimble, responsive, and gives the golfer the most opportunity to control the club head through the stroke. Astral’s blade features a moderate toe-to-heel length, square lines, and rounded bumpers that step down from the top line into the flange.
The Mid-Mallet is better known by golfers as a “double-wide blade”. It’s shorter than the Blade from heel to toe and is deeper from face to tail. This design will provide a bit more MOI (resistance to twisting) and a more modern looking option that should be popular with a wide variety of golfers.
The Mallet is a shape unique to Astral and is our favorite of the three. It’s a take on the fanged mallet we’ve all come to love but has its own unique look to set it apart. In some ways it almost reminds us of Batman, with the edges of the flange diagonally reaching out from the center to the tips of the fangs. As far as mallets go, we consider it to be on the smaller side. It’s relatively compact, but you still get the stability benefits this design typically offers.
The System – Astral Putters
The centerpiece of the Astral fitting system is the hosel. There are three “Z” shaped hosels of different lengths to choose from, and each one produces a different starting point when it comes to how much toe hang is available. The shortest encourages the most toe hang, the longest works best for face-balanced configurations, and the middle length bridges the gap with its versatility.
That’s not all though. These hosels can be oriented in any way the user wants in a 360 degree circle, producing wildly different results. What do we mean? Look close at the end of the hosel in the picture below. See the notches? Each one represents a clock position and there are 10 of them to choose from. Better yet – each hosel is reversible and the other end has another 10 notches to offer 10 more clock positions. Having a hard time imagining this? Let’s look at the picture of the three heads below, each with the hosel in a different place.
The Blade (far left) shows something similar to the type of offset we’d see with a plumber’s neck hosel. The Mid-Mallet in the center shows no offset at all. Finally, the Mallet shows a configuration similar to a flow neck hosel. All three of these settings are fairly common in production putters, but there are some wildly unique choices available. Want to try some onset? How about approximating a Zero Torque putters? You can do it with Astral. Better yet, you use the different hosel lengths to balance your desired amount of toe hang with the offset look you prefer at address. The options are almost limitless.
Fitting
It’s easy to see that there’s a level of complexity to the Astral fitting system. The execution is quite easy though. Each component attaches with a screw that tightly secures it. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to know that these putters are combinations of components when they are fully assembled. The company takes great pride in the tight tolerances they are able to produce.
Where to start though?
First, if you’re not a devout putter nerd that knows exactly what works for you, we highly recommend taking the path of least resistance. Reach out to the company. You can meet with their experts at no additional cost, and they will guide you to the right fit via email and eventually a video conference. They will discuss your aesthetic preferences and common misses in pre-consultation. Once you have their putter in hand, they’ll watch you take putts and guide you through the necessary adjustments to really dial things in.
What fun is that though?
We’re joking of course, but the fact remains that there is a group of us out there that has both the knowledge and desire to tinker, and Astral is the tinkerer’s dream come true. For those of you like us, we still suggest reaching out to the company to talk options, but from there we’ll point you to their fitting page. There you will find a full explanation and diagrams of the Astral system, along with a number of suggested starting points to build common putter configurations.
Throughout the review process we built flow necks, plumber’s necks, face-balanced putters, a zero-torque style design, and some we aren’t even sure have a name yet. The process takes a few minutes at most and is incredibly gratifying, as you can almost instantly see the results from your changes. As adventurous as we were, we still found that the old-fashioned flow neck worked best for us. Old habits are hard to break.
Of course, putter fitting has considerations other than offset and toe-hang. Length and lie angle are vitally important as well. Astral provides guidance on both of these things, and their method of choosing a lie angle was particularly helpful at home. As you likely know, lie angle impacts how upright or flat the putter and the shaft come up from the ground. Most companies default to 70 degrees. Improper lie angle can trick you into standing too far from or too close to the ball. It can force changes in your setup that negatively impact your natural stroke.
In addition, we learned that our desired lie angle could even change with the style of putter we were using! For example, the flow neck design by nature tricks the eyes into wanting to stand further from the ball. By adjusting it more upright with one of the five spuds Astral offers we were able to achieve a comfortable setup with our preferred head shape in seconds. This alone was worth the price of admission – a true “lightbulb” moment.
The Options and Customization
It seems crazy to say that there are even more ways to customize and dial in an Astral Putter, but there are. The company truly wants their product to be something that will last you a lifetime, and they’ve found ways to future-proof their putters.
First, as part of the fitting and building process, there are both shaft and grip options to pick from. The black KBS CT Tour shaft is available in a no-step or single step option. In addition, there are five grips available from Winn and SuperStroke.
Our favorite piece of customization is on the putter head itself. Astral’s component design goes even deeper than fitting choices. It allows you to swap the face insert and radically alter how the putter sounds and feels. Three base options are available: brass, copper, and carbon steel. Each one is much thicker than the inserts we typically seen on production putters and has unique properties that makes it stand out from the others.
Astral describes the brass as “crisp”, which is another way of saying it’s the firmest feeling insert they offer. Make no mistake – you will notice the firmness and high-pitched “ting” sound of the brass insert right away. There is a small group of enthusiasts out there that love the brass feel, and Astral delivers is nicely with this option.
The copper insert is described as the softest of the three, which proved to be true in terms of tactile feedback. This soft metal is undoubtedly much smoother than brass, though it does still carry with it a slightly higher pitched sound at impact. One thing we loved about the copper insert was its smooth, uniform look when installed. It contrasted nicely with the black head and provided a great visual cue for alignment purposes.
Our favorite of the three stock Astral insert options was the carbon steel. This insert is decidedly the most “modern” of the three in the sense that it is very familiar sounding compared to other current milled putters. Impact produces a soft, low-pitched click that we enjoyed with a variety of golf balls.
Are three insert choices not enough for you? If not, Astral even releases limited edition face inserts throughout the year. We had the pleasure of trying a Damascus steel insert, and it was impossible not to fall in love. The softness, responsiveness, and amazing visuals from the Damascus steel made this a winner in every sense of the word.
Astral offers a full customization program with engraving and color finishes in almost any combination you can imagine. They also utilize their custom program to create limited edition putters throughout the year. A personal favorite of ours was released ahead of the Masters last month. Emblazoned in green and yellow, this Reserve Series Augusta Collection putters from Astral are true standouts.
The Performance – Astral Putters Review
Finally, we come to performance. This was a tricky category to judge Astral putters in – not because they didn’t perform, but because they can (and do) perform so differently with every change that is made.
We felt like it was our duty to build and test as many configurations as possible in the last couple months. First, it was fun, but we also wanted to know if these builds behaved like we expected them to.
So, we had great putting performances, and we had some days better off forgotten. Why? Simply stated, because fitting matters. For example, the flow neck with an upright setting we built produced amazing and repeatable success. A face balanced putter we built did what face balanced putters do. Unfortunately for us, face balanced putters don’t make many putts. The plumber’s neck build delivered ample toe hang and face closure through the stroke. You get the point, which really proves Atral’s entire point – if you take the time to really dive in, whether on your own or with their experts’ help, you can craft a putter that wants to deliver a square face over and over again.
The Details – Astral Putters Review
Base prices for all Astral Putters start at $500. That price can increase if you decide to order extra fitting components like hosels, lie angle adapters, or face inserts. Custom options and Reserve Series putters are obviously priced a bit higher to reflect the additional work put into the product.
We highly encourage you to visit Astral’s social media pages and website, astralputters.com. At the least, you might start to learn just what it is that makes a putter work for you. You might even come away designing your own.
