I am back and forth on scents and flavors.
They must work as fish clearly use smell as a sense to find food, however the question for me is whether they are better than the natural scent of the bait your using & secondly can they be counterproductive depending on the level used.
As an example I used to spray meat with things like Tutti frutti on the Kennet and it certainly worked but then I started to think why was I trying to change the smell of the meat which is an attractor in its own right ? If the Barbel wanted and were being attracted to the Tutti Frutti then it would make more sense to use something else as a carrier, for example some sort of paste with Tutti Frutti in it than spray it all over a bit of meat. Nowadays I rarely flavor baits although on occasion I may spray something like a bit of bread if the water has some color but more often than not I will just use a different bait.
The other point is I think people can over flavor their baits. Tim Paisley wrote some interesting stuff about this and the reaction of Carp to over flavored baits on one of the waters he fished. He noticed that a single highly flavored hookbait attracted Carp to the general area but then they appeared as if they were hunting around for something but could not pin point the actual bait itself. It was almost as if there was so much flavor in the water they couldn’t pin point the source amongst the “smog” if I can put it like that. If I use a human analogy (big word needed here, where is Nots Kev when you need him ?
) …I like curry but I prefer a korma to a vindaloo i.e if you over spice it your going to put me off. I think the same can apply to fish as well. The fact is that its very easy to over flavour baits and ground baits as there is always the underlying idea that “more” must be better…when perhaps the old adage less is more could actually be better on some occasions. Based on my own experience UNDER flavored baits can actually be productive. I have caught quite a few fish on washed out baits.
All that said adding flavor to baits and especially ground baits can be fun. One thing I do a lot is keep any sort of powders or liquids that have gone past their use by date as additives for ground bait. Old packets of things like powdered Coca, Nesquick old packets of soup powder and so on. My shed is full of stuff like that…I keep forgetting to take it with me when I go and I end up hoarding it all.