Carp Bait | Butyric Acid | Advice To Make Your Homemade Baits Shockingly Powerful!

The n-butyric acid ethyl ester, ethyl butyrate is the ester responsible for that ever so distinctive ‘pineapple’ flavour. Nearly everyone is now familiar with the famous ‘pineapple and butyric acid’ bait flavour combination!

Use of butyric acid as a flavour and as a flavour booster is nothing new. It can make a difference to baits when just a few drops are added but then again you might experiment with far more generous levels in your homemade baits to really make them act like beacons to carp!

It has been used for decades by those in the know, but it has become popular especially as an instant attractor and it works very well in low water temperatures and is a great alternative to using the often over-used Tutti Fruiti for example. Saying that in my opinion the pineapple and butyric acid combination is over-used far too much these days. It is very well worth remembering that butyric acid can be used with so many flavours, even if they do not mix really well together!

For example pure pineapple flavour ethyl butyrate is not soluble in glycerine, but you can still use the two substances together in a bait dip for instance and they are both highly water-soluble which is a massive advantage in making your baits perform the best! All it takes is having a will to be experimental and finding out more and more, to the unique benefit of your own personal fishing success, instead of slavishly just following the herd and just achieving merely average catch results.

In my opinion and personal experience any angler who actually makes the conscious decision to make himself a better more aware angler can through persistence achieve the kinds of catches the top anglers catch. But having a vastly heightened awareness and deep knowledge of how bait substances affect fish and also water just as importantly I might add, can out-fish the best anglers.

You can out-fish bait-sponsored anglers like Martin bowler and Terry Hearn who pre-bait using maybe over a hundred kilograms of bait. But to beat anglers who are well prepared you need more potent baits. Fortunately using far more potent and better optimised bait you need to use less volumes of bait. This offsets the cost of making homemade baits that truly out-perform any commercial readymade bait. Bait if truly prepared and formulated to the heights of potency is a gigantic leveler of time, experience and skills and talent, but because so many anglers on the bank have become conditioned by magazine writers to not think hard enough for themselves, to not investigate what bait substances actually do once in water and when consumed by fish, most anglers are ignorant and fearful about making their own baits.

My mission is to enlighten the average angler so he can massively multiply his catches, and not expect miracles from merely having the same mindset as the herd. What you think determine what you do in life. Change your thoughts, with new thoughts, and your actions and fishing results will improve! If you cannot beat them, join them as they say; hence my own magazine articles in Freespool magazine and Crafty Carper magazine. You will note that I am not particularly biased towards any bait company; because my bias is only on what truly works best so my fellow anglers waste as little time and money as possible in achieving their fishing dreams!

If you saw my dedicated Carp Food section in Crafty Carper magazine then you will be a little more enlightened with my specifically-focused writing on what carp are highly stimulated to and attracted by, and also on what certain powerful bait substances actually are and what they do to carp once inside them!

Many trial readymade baits from bait companies are made more potent than the actual commercial baits when released to the public. This ensures the trial baits catch lots of good fish for field testers, but then a different version is released to the public at large! This is simply because the commercial costs of releasing the trial versions mean these baits are inevitably unprofitable. So you can easily see how you can level things out by making your own homemade baits massively more potent by making very specifically enhanced homemade baits, never based on bulk binders - and always made to achieve maximum fish responses!

You might think that a bait is just a bait, and that just a bit of plastic will do the job, but that is so not true! As Frank Warwick now admits, and many of us have known for years, rubber and plastic and foam are far more effective when impregnated or contaminated with powerful triggers and attractors, and I do not merely mean a solvent based flavours here, that is for sure! The new gimmick of putting paste inside a hollow bit of fake corn is hilarious to me. People are so fixated with outward appearances. Why limit the impact of a bait by 75 percent by coating its surface with plastic; doing that is just insane!

If you want to beat sweetcorn there are many ways to do it! For instance take into account one fact. Sweetcorn is high in water. Sweetcorn is high in soluble sugars. These sugars attract water inside sweetcorn very well and by pressures of diffusion release outwards the soluble sugars (and betaine) naturally within the kernels.

Much of the success of sweetcorn relates to how the substances in sweetcorn are released, the weight and size of the corn compared to natural food items, and the grazing, even binging modes of behaviours carp have in the presence of particular food items. The soluble and insoluble fibre of corn, quite apart from the sweetness and colour and tone and textures etc all play their part too. The water content of many of the natural food items carp find in water is high. Making baits which move in water like natural water filled food items is easy when you know how!

How those items actually move in water due to their relative density and weight compared to the water around them is very important to consider in getting around fish caution. I say this because the vast majority of readymade baits such as boilies and pellets simply are not a solution to this problem at all! Pop-up baits are invariably hard, usually rounded, and bottom baits are dense with a closed structure. Such baits are nothing like natural food items that carp most often detect in their environment!

I am learning all the time how substances get processed in the body in ways that could potentially mean more bites. Carp are known to eat aquatic foliage, and are in many cases feeding not just off the carbohydrate energy from the cellulose in the plants, but from the sucrose, the sugar that provides an instant energy hit to carp! I used to boil my boilies in honey with good reason! The use of glucose syrup by some bait companies today is an edge I have used for decades. Yet glucose and fructose, plus specific feed-triggering taste enhancers make baits far more potent.

Using a sucrose based sweetener alongside a protein-based sweetener such as Talin intensifies impacts at carp receptors, and improves repeated feeding and bait palatability and absorbent capacity of baits to water (another massive edge!) Practical uses of much lesser known bait knowledge go far deeper, and their impacts and results on catches can be very shocking!

I out-fished 2 anglers who fished for England by exploiting my bait knowledge to full effect in real fishing. It really is about exploiting the maximum possible concentrations in water of substances in order to keep fish most excited in multiple sensory ways and maintaining this excited state by regular introduction of optimum concentrations of substances. I also proved to one of the top rods on Horseshoe Lake in a very shocking very visual way while testing baits in the margins, just how much more powerful you can make you baits, even to the extent of making fish ignore a previously very successful bait in preference to your own bait!

For someone to watch as their previously very successful bait was totally ignored while fish head banged the bottom searching for remnants of an alternative competing bait introduced by me was obviously a very strong good reason for them to find out more about bait! It was a massive shock to that angler who witnessed my bait testing demonstration to him, because he used to match fish for England as a youth and had never seen his spod mix (a salmon fry crumb based ground bait,) totally ignored, while fed in directly alongside a competing bait before (which I had introduced!)

So what is so special about organic acids and short-chain fatty acids such as butyric acid, and it, why do carp appear to be attracted to it so much? Well For one thing carp are very sensitive to the presence of substances such as esters, or short-chain fatty acids in solution in the water around them! In fact carp are extremely sensitive to carbonic acid, and this indicates to them the relative levels of dissolved oxygen in the water, as carbon dioxide when dissolved in water forms carbonic acid.

This type of particular sensitivity ensures that carp remain more energy-efficient and more likely to survive, by remaining in more oxygenated water. This also explains how carp detect the most oxygenated water in very hot conditions, when in extreme de-oxygenation carp will gulp at the surface water. But carp will also be drawn to the water at the end of a wind as they can detect this water has the least carbonic acid and most oxygen.

It is very obvious that having a high natural sensitivity to acids is a key to survival, but not just in carp, but us humans too. We have very dulled senses compared to carp but we certainly detect volatile esters such as butyric acid as volatile vapours in the air we smell, taste and breathe in!

Do you ever wonder why we have cheese and pineapple on cocktail sticks or even have wine and cheese together at a meal? Certain substances compliment each other for many reasons, and in this case improvement of digestion is one example.

Another name for butyric acid is butyrate and many familiar flavours contain butyrates, for example ethyl butyrate is naturally found in various plant extracts. Butyric acid freezes at -7.9 degrees C and boils at 163.6 C so it’s excellent for cold water use in heated baits! Ethyl butyrate boils at 120 Celsius so it is also useful in heated baits as less is lost in the heating process even though it is a quite volatile!

You might think that just adding perhaps 1 or 2 milliliters of pure butyric acid to your baits would be the only way to exploit it, instead of using just a few drops, but that is the tip of the iceberg! Think about this substance and you will realise it is very common in various other substances that can be exploited, from plant oils, to cheese products for instance.

There are many other sources and ways to introduce butyric acid into your baits and ground baits, boilies, pastes, dips, particle baits etc in multiple ways. Just one example is to use blue cheese powder in your spod mix or paste, while also using a blue cheese flavour or a butter flavour for instance! Not many anglers today would think of using a strong butter cream flavour alongside butyric acid, but this is just one of many suggestions I could reveal that really are genuinely effective successful alternatives to the most common pineapple and butyric acid flavours that are so much over-used that carp have in too many cases become wary of them!

Butyric acid is a common natural signal when in solution (in water) for the presence of  potential food in the environment and carp have evolved to use a massive range of such signals as natural indicators, of both opportunities for survival as well as threats! I say this because baits and flavours that are used far too often usually by the herd mentality weekend warrior type angler who just depends on the most fashionable readymade baits, really can unwittingly be in a situation where his bait is actually a really serious barrier to his success! Carp associate previously successful flavours with far more caution, even to the point of ignoring all baits with such familiar signals!

This is no exaggeration, and in discussion for example with Nash Bait man Gary Bayes only confirmed my view that even high nutritional value baits can totally blow when fish get hooked too much on them. But change the signals, adapt them and make them different and results keep on coming. This is one reason why making your own baits and finding out how to create your own unique preparations that no-one else can ever copy is so vital to long-term success!

This is why I keep plugging the truth that you can always maximise your results by being more sophisticated and different to the herd and exploiting the kinds of bait secrets insights I am so passionate about evolving and discovering more and more, even though I do not share the very best of what I know for free. But do understand all my work costs me time and money and it is certainly not free to me, and I have done this work full time for the past 6 years now.

In some ways you could attribute part of the success of fake rubber baits such as sweetcorn to the actual handling by us of such baits. I am referring here to the butyric acid that comes out of our skin naturally; thus contaminating these so-called inert fake baits with this ester plus other substances such as various other fatty acids, salts and so on! You could when you think creatively like I make myself do, come up with very simple alternative solutions to making successful baits perform better. So many ideas are obvious to me. One is simply to add a little butyric acid to your fake baits, or during the preparation of maize or hemp for example, or even add a few milliliters of butyric acid straight into a can of sweetcorn, and soak it in overnight!

Another prime example of other natural substances in the environment that carp use to detect food all the time are the amino acids and betaine issuing from mollusks and crustacean, snails, mussels, shrimps and many other benthic or bottom living and sediment dwelling potential food items. Many organisms have micro-organisms in their gut to complete their digestion, and part of this is the production and use as an energy source of butyric acid so it is a very common substance carp detect within their invertebrate and other foods.

The natural substances found in the water released from a myriad of natural food items and used a homing beacons by carp is an entire subject that I could write another book about, because it is so incredibly important to really understand and fully exploit to the very maximum effect. Ninety nine percent of baits do not do this so I think you can see how there is room for improvement here, to improve your catches on a quantum level!

Each week I discover more and more about how carp detect and exploit substances, and many of these are not being used in the mainstream readymade baits, if at all. But having a knowledge of them and a will to source them opens the way to creating the kinds of baits and bait formats and experiences of new exciting and incredibly stimulating optimised attraction and nutritional and hormone based stimulating baits that carp find totally irresistible.

Amino acid attraction and stimulation based on nitrogen needs is a tiny fraction of the knowledge that may or may not be exploited when making you mind up to achieve all your fishing dreams through the leverage of bait substances the herd will always be too fixated over instant readymade short-term solutions to ever exploit! Basically, if you are constantly looking for a quick fix, you will never reach the magnitude of success you truly deserve. Being a consultant for a number of bait companies you are part of the ongoing creative process that is a constant theme in the act of staying ahead of carp, with new products and spins on uses for existing baits substances and new bait substances etc.

The secret is to develop yourself and your knowledge and applied skills, because you are truly your own greatest edge. That means reading the best secrets and using them, and they do not come for free. Just buying a bag of baits is as far from optimising your chances as you can possibly get!

So many anglers short-sightedly think they will not invest in buying any information except biased magazines full of advertorials, and then go out and buy bait that costs far more than information that will transform their catches for life! They go fishing and expect miracles with their bag of readymade baits of convenience, but will never achieve maximum results simply by doing this. All heated baits and machine rolled baits are under-optimised and perform far below what is truly possible, for a massive list of reasons, in fact so many reasons that I could write a book just on this subject alone!

 To make catching fish far easier for you than the average angler in the next swim you need to think and do more than expect miracles from readymade baits. And you have to value information to appreciate it enough to make the magic happen for you.

Think about this, because seriously developing your knowledge of bait and how fish actually detect it and utilize it opens doors to success that most anglers will never find in a lifetime of fishing. 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.