Flavours are such an issue with carp anglers and the fruity ones especially I thought it well worth a look into to show you a few tips that can help you improve your catch results. Whether you use readymade baits or make your own this unique article on bait flavours, impacts and components is highly stimulating and reveals a number of great insights and flavour and bait secrets you can exploit to catch loads more fish!

Fruit flavours naturally form as part of the ripening process as fruits mature. The whole point of most fruits is to be as attractive as possible to the creatures that will consume them and thus spread the seeds that are contained as they are excreted out of the creatures. Fruits are most attractive when fully rips and tend to give us signals not to eat them when not ripened fully. For instance eating lots of unripe apples will not do your digestive system any favours!

Have you ever noticed how tart and strongly acidic apples are when unripe? Acids are a very significant part of the reasons why fruits are very successful in carp baits. For example, malic acid from apples is used to enhance the sensory impacts of very many flavours and is well-known edge in bait terms with those guys more knowledgeable about flavours. Acids and sugars are not all there are to fruit flavours. Fruits are basically dual health, energy and nutritional providers, for the creatures that eat them and fruits also can provide extremely rich environments for seeds to germinate in when broken down.

Fruits contain sugars and these are instant energy to fish. Fish tend to really home in on instant energy sources that enter their blood stream very quickly. For eons, fish have fed upon season fruits dropping into water. But fish adapt to new flavours and flavour components all the time whenever their sensory systems encounter them. In very similar ways humans adapt and cross-adapt senses to be able to more easily identify and exploit and monopolise fresh new sources of foods.

Flavours are very definitely a notable sign post of good food. Ethyl butyrate is one of the cheapest and most commonly used flavour components. It is used in citrus and pineapple type flavours as well as in plum, peach, apricot, mango and guava among many others. However in the case of foods and the human food industry today, just because a food has a good flavour, this does not equate to a good taste and highly significantly it may not actually mean that a food is good for you (or fish!) It may just mean that flavours cover up a host of negative effects and impacts that foods can have.

Many anglers get worried about using synthetic flavours but have virtually no idea how extremely diverse such flavours and components are, no idea what reactions can occur in water and at carp sensory sites of contact and what internal impacts many components and solvents can have on fish beneficially! Did you know that glycerine has a similar food energy value in terms of energy as white table sugar and is a sweetener in its own right?

Glycerine-based flavours are very effective in part because glycerol is completely water-soluble. It is used to extract herb extracts and used in making herbal tinctures and in successfully removing tannins in these and so on. It is used in preference with herbs because compared to ethanol alcohol it has no secondary denaturing or inert rendering effects on herbal extract constituents.

Glycerol has many advantages over alcohol as a bacteriostatic and having bactericidal action so it is ideal for use with natural fruit flavours for instance. Such mixtures can help preserve baits for long periods, especially if further acids or low pH substances are added. Glycerol will sweeten flavours as well as add some food energy value. Glycerol is also better than ethanol alcohol in regard to its much higher boiling point of 290 degrees Celsius so you actually do not lose it compared to alcohol when heating up baits in cooking them; after all you want those flavours still inside your baits when you use them and not lost into the air right!

Many anglers mistakenly believe that flavours cover up bitter tastes that carp find attractive but in fact very many flavours are exceptionally bitter yet are highly successful in high levels! Sweetened flavours tend to enrich the impacts of flavours on fish senses so for instance there will be a higher likelihood of repetitive feeding responses as a result of Talin used in combination with fructose concentrate or sucrose rich substances such as honey. I regard betaine as a sweetener and enhancer in this respect also.

Not many anglers think of being that creative in creating their own fishing bait edges but all it takes is a deeper knowledge of substances and it is very easy! For example, simply mix black strap molasses and or Minamino plus some enzyme-treated liver with 1000:1 strength flavour to create something entirely new and unique!

Flavours and in particular sweet and fruity and sweet spicy flavours are very much used to entice people to eat more food than is healthy for them. If you took the flavours and cocoa out of chocolate and just saw how much sugar and nasty transfats are in chocolates I very much doubt people would regard them as sane to eat! Did you know that coco is lethal to dogs? The very same natural substance hailed as a miraculous (theobromine) can have negative consequences if consumed in too high quantities – just like anything!

One point I could make here is that that some of the more successful flavours may not just be a label or smell as it were, but actually contain certain substances with very significant bioactive internal impacts on fish. But you can make your own highly successful metabolic rate stimulating flavours too with the right knowledge!

I doubt doctors would approve of chocolate containing so much sugar! It certainly has a contributory role in causing diabetes in western people. But guess what, one of the most used flavours is used in chocolate, namely vanilla. This flavour has evolved from the natural to various synthetically-produced and extracted combinations.

There was a time when you could not buy any readymade carp baits at all and so making homemade baits was the only option. At this time I was one of thousands of anglers in the seventies and early eighties and onwards who made their own baits and used all kinds of flavours as the major attractors in cheap carbohydrate and more nutritionally stimulating carp baits.

Fruit esters are some of the most recognisable components in carp bait flavours because they are very volatile in air which means we get to smell them very easily despite our very poor sense of smell and taste compared to carp. When you walk into fishing shops you will often encounter the pungent aromas of carp fishing baits, of fruit notes and solvents in the air of many forms. One point I will say about solvents and esters is that many of these and other highly successful bait substances are very easily mixed with water; they are either totally miscible, extremely hygroscopic or at least have the minimum of water solubility so they mix with water.

When it comes to flavours, the degree to which flavour components are able to mix with water is so vital to success in many ways. Some flavour components can mix with water immediately and in doing so suck water into your baits quickly so enabling less soluble substances to leach out more efficiently. Some flavour components have low water solubility and may tend to form an oily layer on the water surface, but this does not stop them being attractive to carp, and fruit oils are very well-known carp attractors.

When fruits ripen they ferment. This produces alcohols and as most of us know, alcohols are very volatile and easy to detect. They mix with water very easily too and work well in lower water temperatures especially when water is denser. The more highly soluble a flavour or solvent is, the more easily it can be dispersed in the water column and be detected by fish tracking the concentration gradient of the flavour or solvent in solution back to your bait.

If you have not done this before, try a few tests for yourself. Get 3 brands of the same flavour, for instance pineapple and butyric acid or cranberry or banana or Scopex for example and just soak your hook baits for 24 hours in neat flavour. Them fish these against each other on an easy lake and see which flavour out-performs the others. On this point I think it is hilarious how many anglers actually sit there moaning about their readymade baits not producing fish when they are just not prepared to think for themselves and experiment.

Readymade baits are not the ultimate pinnacle of all you can count on because Mr Carp has plenty of other ideas about this and can respond in all kinds of ways so you either do not get bites as the fish are too wary of all too familiar baits or simply do not even recognise your bait as food for whatever reason, or simply ignore your baits because there is nothing in them that will overcome their natural caution although the fish may be all too well aware they are in the water!

If you fancy doing something a little different this year as we go into the autumn and colder months why not help yourself with this little trick: Combine your favourite glycerol-based flavour with your favourite alcohol based flavour with butyric acid. Simply mix them up at a rate of a third each in your mixture. Try making up 9 millilitres of this flavour mixture and to this add a millilitre of Talin, a millilitre of intense sweetener and a millilitre of liquid betaine.

You might think that this sounds over the top but you will be surprised! Try this at the level of 3 millilitres to 5 millilitres per pound of boilie base mix or double it or even treble it for both hook baits and free baits when soaking your readymade baits or in making your homemade baits. Do this in small batches and test your new baits against ones you have been using and see the results! Much depends on the pH of the water you are fishing so try a few different flavour levels OK!

One aspect of flavours that is fascinating is that you can often hit into different other species when using different flavour levels. Also one flavour termed pineapple for instance will be better at a higher or lower level in your water compared to another brand. The comparative components and effects of different brands are vitally important to consider! This is a very big point and just one reason why testing different flavour levels in slightly different baits on 3 rods can seriously open your eyes!

So why not do your own testing and do not just go for the first brand or popular flavours that you come across; test them OK! For example I use a butter cream flavour that I have personally adapted and added to with further esters and acids etc; and it has proven to be just as effective as any leading brand of Scopex! For more on this see my biography.

Flavour recipes are closely guarded secrets of course but there is nothing stopping you breaking the rules of convention and going your own way in your own testing and formulating o flavours! I am certainly not against using perhaps just 2 millilitres of a particular flavour when making a homemade bait or bait dip or soak or maybe even 30! Always remember that not all flavours are on the same base, may not even have a base, and many will certainly not be anywhere near 1000:1 concentration so you can use loads more!

I would have no hesitation in using this in very high levels in very soluble open texture ground baits. I personally might add all kinds of other things, from essential oils like clove oil or terpenes, eugenol, chilli extracts or other spice oleoresins, banana oil, pineapple oil, liquid emulsifier etc, citric and, ascorbic acid and many lesser well known solvents and highly bioactive substances too.

I have just made a totally natural flavour based on liquidised elderberries, fresh fennel seeds, pineapple which is just over-ripe, plums, black berries, raspberries and high potency liquid emulsifier, essential oils, fruit and spice and herbal oils, seed extracts and some other substances. Everything I have put into this flavour has a strong purpose for being there and I would put this kind of homemade flavour against anything synthetic and most of this flavour was free because I went out and picked the ripe fruits myself.

Just on the point of over-dosing, you might worry about solvents but what about acids? Maybe try using 1 millilitre of butyric acid (instead of just a few drops,) in your autumn winter baits this year and see what happens!

Just a note of caution, use gloves when handling any acids as they are extremely reactive you know; which is rather the point. I recommend you really think about the significance of this to achieve loads of competitive edges over other baits and fish caution too OK! Revealed in my unique readymade bait and homemade bait carp and catfish bait secrets ebooks is far more powerful information look up my unique website (Baitbigfish) and see my biography below for details of my ebooks deals right now!

By Tim Richardson.