LA Golf Bel-Air, Malibu putters

Gear: LA Golf Bel-Air, Malibu putters
Price: $499 (Bel-Air, Malibu), $599 (Bel-Air X, Malibu X)
Specs: Carbon fiber heads with grooved stainless steel face inserts, tungsten weights and graphite shafts

Who it’s For: Golfers who love technology and want extreme perimeter weighting and forgiveness in a traditional-sized putter.

The Skinny: LA Golf’s Bel-Air and Malibu putter heads are made using carbon fiber instead of steel, which allowed designers to add large tungsten weights in the heel and toe for stability while a variable-loft face helps to improve the consistency of your roll.

The Deep Dive: LA Golf is an equipment company that has made a name for itself by not only making high-performance graphite shafts for woods and irons but also specializing in graphite shafts for putters. The company has also signed several well-known players as brand ambassadors, including Bryson DeChampeau, Dustin Johnson and Michelle Wie West.

Last year, LA Golf released its first club, a $1,500 blade putter that was made from carbon fiber instead of steel and that came with one of the company’s graphite shafts. At that price, the brand knew it would not sell many putters, but like a concept car, it showed what LA Golf could do. Now, with the release of its GEN 2 putters — the Bel-Air and Malibu — LA Golf is bringing the technologies it debuted last year to a broader audience.

It is likely that every putter you have ever used is either made from stainless steel or a combination of stainless steel, aluminum and tungsten, but LA Golf makes its putter heads using carbon fiber. In the case of the standard Bel-Air blade and Malibu mallet, the carbon fiber is compression molded, a process that involves heating the carbon fiber and pressing it into the desired shape. For the Bel-Air X and the Malibu X putters, the carbon fiber is forged into a block before getting milled into the final shape by a computer-guided bit.

In both cases, the carbon fiber is five times less dense than the stainless steel often used in putters, resulting in a huge amount of discretionary weight that can be utilized to improve performance.

Much of that weight is concentrated in a 106-gram tungsten weight in the toe and an 88-gram tungsten weight in the heel of the GEN2 putters. Those weights create extreme perimeter weighting, which enlarges the sweet spot and helps to keep the Bel-Air and the Malibu stable on off-center hits.

The LA Golf putters…