It was many moons ago that I dabbled with rolling my boilies, with no other means other than by hand. When I say hand I mean from the ball of dough to take a pinch and roll in the palm of my hand and that's number one and so on. What a pain staking way until the small rolling tables from Gardner came into the fore and with sausage guns made the process so much easier.

Originally all I used was a fish meal base mix (only) no additions whatsoever and caught, progressed onto liquidizing a tin of sardines in tomato sauce and adding to the same mix and still caught. I thought this was the dogs until I moved onto flavours such as Monster Crab, Lobster Thermador and the infamous Squid and Octopus which absolutely stunk to high heaven. These were still catching fish but it meant that doing the mix indoors could no longer be tolerated as you will agree and no doubt, been in the same boat.

Now this inconvenience had to be overcome and the easiest way was to use one of the bait rolling services that were advertised in the carping mags .

What a difference this made, no more mess a simple phone call and just had to wait for the delivery later that week. Problem Solved!

I think we all take for granted these boilies we receive, and don't think about the processes involved in the manufacture of your chosen product for which we highly regard.

A bit of history from this company, initially started buying in mixes from all the leading bait suppliers i.e. Hutchy, Nash, Essential and rolling them to order by using compressed air guns with varying sized nozzles and Shilham rolling tables. These were then placed in an extra large burco boiler for the boiling and then onto wire trays for cooling. The next process was to freeze the baits and bag them for next day delivery by carrier.

The interest in the rolling service was becoming more popular and demanding especially when Nick Stevenson from M16 was approached by Rod Hutchinson to produce his brand of boilies in ready made form for the worldwide distribution.

With this in mind a decision had to be made whether to invest and go for fully automated machinery, really that was the only answer as the quantities in question could not be done by hand.

A HANDFUL OF BOLIES FRESHLY MADE BOLIES

"DOUGH MIXER" BAIT BOLIE FORMER UNDER TRIALS

PRODUCTION LINE GOING ON PRODUCT COOKER

The first step in the new process was to blend the base mixes with the chosen dry additives in a cement mixer, this is done in batches of 30kg. The large quantities are weighed on floor scale where the smaller quantities are weighed using electronic digital scales capable of weights down to 0.01 grammes .

From here the mix is placed in the dough mixer where the liquids are added such as eggs, sweeteners, preservatives etc. Once the desired consistency is achieved the dough is force fed into the extruder which pumps the mix through 12-15 or 20mm nozzles into the rollers. This is synchronized as you don't want the sausages dropping into the rollers before the last ones have been rolled.

Once the boilies drop out of the rollers they are fed into the boiler for a predetermined time, then onto a conveyor which takes them onto the drying process.

This process is a bit more complicated than I first thought, into the drying room on wire trays and stacked on top of each other. The drying room uses a series of processes to remove the moisture from the air which is produced from the boilies drying out. Ill try to explain a little on how the drying process works on the boilies.

The first diagram shows the boilie after it initially leaves the boilier showing to be saturated with moisture, then as the drying process starts to work as you can see from the next diagram the first couple of millimeters starts to dry out. For packaging these ready mades the ideal moisture content has to be around 20-25%, and once packaged the moisture is allowed to spread across the full section of the boilie .

With ready mades the one thing that these types of boilies require is a preservative which only 1-2% is used in the mix. A couple of examples are as follows;

Lactic Acid - which is an acid and anti-oxidant, as well as being a preservative. Anti-oxidants are used to preserve food by retarding deterioration, rancidity or discolouration due to oxidation.

Potassium Lactate- is used where moisture is needed to be maintained, e.g. ; Meat and poultry to control food borne pathogenic bacteria and to protect and enhance flavour.

Potassium Sobate - which is a sodium salt of sorbic acid which occurs naturally in fruit. Inhibits fungal growth but allows for bacteria activity.

I do hope that this article has given some of you an insight into what goes on behind the scenes.