The Formulation of a New Bait
By Shaun Harrison
So, how do we arrive at the final recipe the finished bait and what sort of testing do we actually do?
This is such a frequently asked question that I thought I should perhaps answer everyone.
Many of the baits in the Quest Baits range have a very long history to them – certainly a lot longer than Quest has been around. Baits like ‘Fruity Trifle’ have been part of my personal armoury since the late 80’s with just the odd tweak here and there as new ingredients have come to light which I feel are better than some of the ones I used in the original base mix form. But there are also the boilies such as Liver B8 which I have worked on since the formation of Quest Baits.
The Liver B8 was a bait I always wanted to do – total meat based with no fish. It was a case of finding the right ingredients. The actual bait had been in my head for years but it took a long while to track down the ingredients I wanted.
Everyone knows the effectiveness of liver products in baits. Carp love the taste of liver but how many of you are aware of the type of liver you are using? Does your bait have pigs liver in it, cows liver perhaps, chicken liver, lambs liver – the list goes on.
It does make me smile when someone says “My bait is the same as yours – I use Liver and can make it a lot cheaper”! Believe me there are liver products and there are liver products. I could make baits to sell so much cheaper containing the same ingredients by name but certainly not by quality or indeed effectiveness. The main liver powder I eventually chose came after getting hold of so many different ones. I like to think I have a good nose and taste for a decent bait but this isn’t reliable enough I use fish right from day one for me tests and experiments with different ingredients.
People often say that you can’t learn anything from retained fish in tanks or pools. Believe me you can. Do enough 
experiments and you will soon see what really excites the fish and gets their taste buds going. Yes, captive fish tend to eat most things given to them but sample feeding and going into a frenzy are two very different scenarios. Drop a new ingredient in the water and witness a very excited response and you know further experiment is more than worthwhile. Witness an ‘okay it tastes alright’ type of reaction then I rarely bother to proceed a lot further.
ndividual ingredients can sometimes be introduced neat but more often than not I will mix them into a paste with a pretty bland base mix. Once I am certain the fish really like the ingredient I will repeat the process with other bits and bobs until I have a starter base mix to move to the next testing stage.
The next test I do is on my fish in the garden. I am real lucky in having a natural pool in the garden with no liner. All the natural food you will find in the lakes and ponds also occur in my garden so basically the fish have a choice in what they eat. They don’t live in a totally clinical environment like so many other captive fish.
This is the stage I start to play around with different base mix variations. More of one ingredient, less of another etc. I also pass bits of paste onto a couple of friends with more clinical garden pools where observation is much easier than the murky depths of my own. I make a point of not mentioning anything about the results I have found so get a totally un-biased view as to which version their fish seemed to prefer.
Once these initial tests have been completed I move onto ‘proper lakes’. I am most fortunate in having access to several waters where the carp can be observed going about their every day business. One of these waters the carp have been under immense pressure for years and are a really good gauge of how attractive a bait actually is. Get these fish feeding with gay abandon and you know you are almost there.
This is the stage where I make the final tweaks with ingredients and flavour amounts. Once the fish on at least three different lakes are visibly seen eating the bait with gusto I then start to forward small batches to selected people in my small team of testers and consultants. I purposely don’t send it to everyone as some of the team fish the same waters and I find it better to gauge a baits effectiveness whilst being fished at the same time as one of my other baits. If everyone is on the new bait then weather conditions, moon phases and atmospheric pressure could have just fallen right and turned the fish on big time. This would give a very false impression of a bait. Similarly conditions may be that poor that a very good bait could start to give you doubts. By having a ‘good angler’ fishing the same water in the same conditions using a bait you already know is right certainly gives you a clearer indication as to whether the new bait is anything special.
I also try and get the bait fished on totally different types of venue from pressured fish to fish which are hardly ever fished for. I always find it interesting when un-fished for carp are instantly turned on by a bait. Fish which see very few boilies are usually the most difficult ones to tempt with a boilie.
So, there we have a run through of the testing procedures Quest Baits products go through. We don’t simply find a nice flavour and knock a load of base mix ingredients together and hope that the carp will like the finished product. Life would be much simpler this way but we would only be offering you half a service. It is rare that the first mix I make up actually ends up being the finished bait. I let the fish tell me from a wide variety of waters which they prefer.
I hope this gives a little more insight into the development of a new bait.
Best fishes – Shaun Harrison.
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Tags: angling, anything, armoury, artificial, bait, base, boilies, carp, effectiveness, fish, fishing, formation, france, garden, history, hook, hookbait, list, Liver, meat, mix, name, part, particles, pressure, queries, question, Rigs, tackle, technique, techniques, testing, tips, water, winter
Before using Questbait, I mixed my own ingredients and made my own boilies. I had been doing this for over 20 years. One ingredient that made a huge difference to both my meaty and fishy baits was human grade A liver powder. I never went into detail about the type of liver I used, all I new was that it smelt great and got the fish feeding, especially in the summer months. Liver powder is a very expensive ingredient, 1 ounce per 16 ounce mix makes a big difference to catch rates, liver baits are definately worth a try on your local waters. Often I couldn’t smell the liver powder in the finished bait, but the fish definitely could.
Hi Jim,
You have raised an incredibly important aspect of bait formulation with the line “Often I couldn’t smell the liver powder in the finished bait, but the fish definitely could”.
Smell and taste are two very different things but many anglers get them mixed up. Most artificial flavours taste totally different to how they smell and most of the ingredients which make a huge difference in baits hardly have any smell at all.
Betaine, salt and monosodium glutamate, to name just a few well known additives have hardly any noticeable smell but they all make a huge difference to the taste of a bait and belive me carp are aware of them all even when just tiny amounts are added to the water they swim in.
Baits don’t need to have a strong smell. I prefer them as subtle as possible - this is why I am a great lover of pre-soaking baits to get rid of a certain amount of flavour as well as making them look as though they have been out there a while so hopefully safe to eat.
Hi Shaun, I agree if an ingredient is in a bait the fish can detect it even when we can’t. A fish detects smells and tastes very differently to us and can detect very small quantities of a substance. I think a lot of baits have far too much flavour, carp can find bloodworm etc., but I can’t detect any smell from a blood worm. Years ago I tried experimenting with introducing baits with different flavour levels all at the same time. The idea was that they would become attractive at different times as the flavour washed out. The approach was quiet successful, can’t think why I didn’t follow it up. I probably got sidetracted.
Yes, there are a lot of baits out there ruined by too much flavour. It amazes me the levels of flavour used in some baits. My old habit of putting things into human terms is by pointing out to people if you make an instant cup of coffee with 5 spoon fulls of cofee - it will smell great but you try and drink it.
Similarly, have the lid fall off the salt pot when you are putting salt over your chips. The smell won’t change at all, but again - you try and eat them.
If in doubt use less would always be my advice. It is little secret that I was behind the launch of the Nash Baits whisky boilies. Interestingly when the flavour was first handed around to the field testers no-one could catch on it yet I was hammering the fish with it. The carp really couldn’t get enough of it at the time.
It turned out I was using it in tiny amounts which the carp loved. Most of the other testers had jumped straight in with 5ml per mix and the carp found it revolting. The whisky nearly didn’t see the light of day untill we realised why the others couldn’t catch with it. The rest is history but this is also the reason Kevin wouldn’t release it in it’s pure flavour form. Most would have struggled to have measured it in small enough amounts to be palatable.