Like most anglers, fishing was passed down to me long before any of this existed. From my Grandfather, to my Father…and eventually to me.
Years later, when I properly got back into carp fishing during the early 2000s, it quickly became more than just a hobby. Like most anglers obsessed with carp fishing, I went through the same cycle everyone does:
Buy this bait.Use that liquid.Try this flavour.Fish freezer bait.Fish shelf life.Follow the latest hype.
The deeper I got into carp fishing, the more frustrating the bait industry became. Every company claims they have the answer. We all know this. Different labels. Different colours. Same recycled ideas. Eventually, I got tired of listening to the noise.
So I packed the rods away for a year and started learning bait from the ground up properly. Mixes. Ingredients. Solubility. Attraction. Digestibility. Breakdown. Testing.
My goal wasn’t to build hype — and it still isn’t. It was to create a bait I genuinely believed in. Something I trusted completely, even when my own bait-making knowledge was still at the lowest level. I wanted a bait that could perform consistently on different waters and different session lengths without relying on gimmicks or trends. When the first bait finally came together — based on just seven ingredients, no less — I took it to a completely unknown water.
Within three hours: four fish on the bank. Three mirrors and a bream. Nothing enormous. But proof of concept. Proof that a no-nonsense approach could work. That session changed everything. From there, the obsession only grew stronger. More testing. More refining. More time spent understanding what actually makes bait work once it hits the water.
Eventually, incQbait was born.
Over the years I’ve built a small but solid team of anglers with different styles, different experience levels, and, as you’d expect, very different opinions. Our bait has been tested on pressured day-ticket waters, syndicates, and everything in between across the UK — with PBs and even lake records in France along the way. For a non-corporate and low key bait brand, that’s pretty damn good.
Since then the philosophy has never changed:
Keep the range tight.Keep the ingredients functional.Keep improving.
No endless flavour lists.No confusing gimmicks.No bait built purely to catch anglers.
and to round it off, from the fear of being influenced by the outside, I've never ever followed a single carp bait manufacturer since. really!
Just fresh rolled bait designed to do its job properly. At the end of the day, good bait is only part of fishing. You still need to find the fish, tie solid rigs, and put yourself in the right spots. But when that part is done, I absolutely believe our bait can help with the rest.
— Jay EdwardsincQbait founder, bait maker, and carp angler