Chinese baijiu brand TingHua has appointed Nobel Prize winners Ferid Murad and Arieh Warshel as its “Chief Scientists.”

Based in Yibin City of southwest China’s Sichuan Province, TingHua launched its baijiu in December 2021, taking pride in spearheading a breakthrough of the traditional Chinese liquor-making technique.

It is claimed that the product includes more than 20 additional specific types of flavours by implementing a new brewing technique to allow the liquor to have “a soft taste and saliva-generating effect”, with a “pleasant aftertaste that can last as long as three hours”.

Recently, the liquor brand announced the addition of two more secret weapons – the Nobel Prize winners Ferid Murad and Arieh Warshel, who join the company as chief scientists.

Born in the US state of Indiana in 1936, Murad was a co-winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for discovering “Nitric oxide as a signalling molecule in the cardiovascular system.”

Warshel is best known as a pioneer in the field of computational studies on functional properties of biological molecules. He received his Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2013 for “the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems”.

According to Murad, they will use “interdisciplinary scientific methods” to guide the brewing team towards studying and verifying a wider application of substances such as nitric oxide in its liquor making.

Meanwhile, Warshel believes that the scientific research results achieved by his team will provide multidimensional references for further improvements in the brewing technology of Chinese liquor, including TingHua baijiu.

Brewed with baijiu that has been aged for up to over ten years, TingHua claims to have gone through 109 procedures in the making process.

Zhang Xuefeng, chairman of Qinghai Spring, said: “Working with Nobel Prize winners shows the brand’s commitment to engage in more in-depth research and exploration of the liquor industry. By doing so, we hope this can actively promote Chinese baijiu in the global market.”