On the top floor of an oversized garage in the small Maine town of Carmel, Peter Cowin and his colleagues conduct some of the smelliest science experiments you’ll ever find.
Many anglers are glad they do.
“It’s impossible to keep clean, so it’s absolutely disgusting up here,” Cowin said during a 2015 interview as he led the way to the room where all the magic happens. “This is the really smelly room.”
The “really smelly room” is the place where 55-gallon drums of a variety of ground-up grossness — smelts, crayfish, earthworms, shiners and 29 other kinds of fish bait — sit during the summer months, slowly bubbling and brewing in preparation.
After a few weeks spent “developing,” as Cowin calls it, the vital liquids are removed and turned into one of the many BioEdge Fishing scents that anglers buy at Cabela’s, Bass Pro Shops, and many other national retail stores. Prices at major stores typically are between $8.49 and $9.
“It can take days to get the smell off you because you get covered in the stuff when you’re doing it. This place doesn’t smell good now, but it smells bad then,” Cowin says with a chuckle.
Since its formation in 2007, BioEdge has emerged as a major player in the field and is available in more than 300 locations in the U.S. and overseas.
BioEdge products come in two forms. One is a “potion.” It’s a liquid. The second is a “wand,” which is more like a tube of lip balm.
Just be sure not to mistake your wand for a Chapstick when you reach into your tackle box. Cowin says the wands have been supersized since their introduction to make sure anglers don’t make that mistake.
Each kind of BioEdge product has a specific application, he says.
“With the [potion] you can put it on any absorbent surface, whether that’s soft plastics that absorb the oils really well [or] flies or feathers or bucktails,” Cowin says. “You could put it straight on bait, but it would tend to wash off a little faster.”
Cowin said he realized that just wasn’t acceptable and found a way to solidify the vital bait oil, making it easier to apply to other surfaces.
“To have a scent which would stay on longer, we put that solidifying process on and made the wand, which you can then rub onto those nonabsorbent surfaces and they would hold it,” he says. “Even metal will hold onto the scent for hours. That way, we can cover all the different means of presentation of an artificial but then make it small and taste like the real bait.”
Cowin studied zoology on the British Isle of Man, and earned his Ph.D while developing the first commercial marine worm farm in the world. He then moved to Maine, where he ran a pilot project in Franklin that also studied the feasibility of farming marine worms.
The techniques he and others developed at that company served as the foundation for BioEdge, and many of his former colleagues became co-owners of the company. Cowin is president of that company.
Cowin said the business is simply doing things in ways that other companies haven’t or can’t. He’s reluctant to give out any company secrets but admits he sometimes feels a bit like a mad scientist when he’s working in the bait “lab.”
“I’ve been called worse [than a mad scientist],” Cowin says. “It is a bit strange. First of all being involved in worm farming before this and then the extracts and the names [of our products] are ‘potions’ and ‘wands,’ it is a little bit of sort of moonlight and magic involved, really, in terms of working out just what it is in those baits that make them so good.”
Cowin said the “brewing” process is a key to the company’s success.
“Getting those extracts in good condition and putting them in a form that can be presented on a lure [is the challenge],” he says. “It’s been a bit of development there, and we try to keep some of our processes secret, because no one else does it our way.”
There are a couple of things Cowin will admit: To make a BioEdge potion or wand, you have to start with a lot of potentially stinky stuff, and you can’t hurry the process.
“We get large volumes of things like crawfish in or herring in, and we grind them up and then make a real stew out of them,” Cowin says. “We put a few other ingredients in there and then let it develop for a certain period of time at certain temperatures. Not a hot process but a process that allows those oils and various goodies in the bait to come out in a form that we can use.”
And Cowin also admits that one man’s “development” of ingredients could easily be described as “decay” or “rot” by another observer.
“Well, you could say it smells like rotten bait, but it depends on whether you like the smell of bait or you don’t like the smell of bait,” he says. “For some people it smells rotten, and for other people it smells like a result, in terms of a fish on the line.”
And it’s those results that keep people coming back for more.
For more information on BioEdge products or to find a retailer near you, visit bioedgefishing.com.
