With an ever-growing fan base in the global whisky community, it’s time for me to finally introduce myself. I am Whisky Cat, although Dengshan is my given name. I’m a well travelled, highly intellectual feline, and the unofficial mascot of Nine Rivers Distillery. However, I’m already famous so I don’t really need any more attention, so I’m going to use my opportunity to talk about my pet human, Daniel Hobbs.
I adopted my pet human back in 2012. I was hanging out in a park in Shanghai, and he caught my attention because he was buried in a maths book. As every cat lover knows, we felines are good with numbers and always looking out for a purrrfect equation. whisky ca
I could see he had some warmth about him and despite an obviously high IQ, he looked like the type of human that I could train quite easily to feed me at the standards I expect of a pet human – the best of everything. None of those boring dry biscuits and nothing from a can. As a lady of exquisite taste, I expect fresh fish daily and it must be deboned, by hand, or it’s just not good enough.
Of course I was correct. There were a few rough edges I needed to polish out of my pet human, but I succeeded in training him and over the last 10 years I’ve gotten to know literally everything about him. So I’ll share it with you all now. whisky cat
My Pet Human’s Story
My pet human was originally born in Houston, Texas, grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, graduated in Physics and Maths, did a Master of Science in Physics, did a Masters of Science in Applied Maths, then took 15 years out of Academia to embark on a teaching career across South Korea and China.
After two roles in South Korea between 2007 and 2012, my pet human came over to China and initially took a role in Shanghai which is coincidentally where I adopted him. After Shanghai, I took my pet human to Nanjing for a few years before I decided I’d prefer some warmer weather during the winter time and told my pet human we needed to move down south to Shenzhen. I’d heard that Shenzhen was cool for cats – and a hot spot not just for native cats, but lots of expat cats from all over the world.
While I was enjoying lazy days on a balcony in Shenzhen, my pet human was setting up a new education program for Bard High School Early College at the Houde Academy in Longhua District in Shenzhen.
With a new job in a new city, my pet human needed to build a new social circle and get to know some other humans in Shenzhen. So, I reached out to some other talking cats that I know (we’re all on WeChat and we can use smartphones…) to ask them all what they had done to give their pet humans a bit of a social life. Humans are useful for providing food and picking the bones out of fish, but the endless fussing and petting gets a bit boring. I needed some “me time”. I had to find some excuses to get Daniel out of the apartment and leave me in peace.
Shenzhen Whisky Cat Networking
Apparently these humans like whisky, and not only does Whisky Networking get humans out of the house, it’s also likely that if they chug enough whisky, that when they eventually come home, they just fall asleep. A few messages to other likeminded cats, a ticket booked to Shenzhen Whisky Networking for my pet human, and the rest as they say is history.
It didn’t get off to a perfect start. In fact, for the first few events, my pet human would take some of his work along with him, and lurk in the corner of the room. whisky cat
I soon fixed that by getting back onto WeChat to some of my new cool cat friends, to tell their pet humans to get my pet human a bit more involved with the other pet humans. It turns out that some of them were even colleagues of my pet human.
Not only did I get an entire guaranteed night of me time once a month, but my human got to know other humans, got a social life, went out more, and my me time hit the perfect sweet spot of a few nights a week.
Nine Rivers Distillery
One night back in 2018, my pet human came home mumbling to himself about a whisky distillery project that some of the Shenzhen Whisky Networking crowd has been discussing. Being a maths nerd, my pet human had been tasked with crunching some numbers about grains, alcohol yields, production capacity, cask filling, forecasted angel’s share, and total number of 9 litre case equivalents. My pet human loves this maths nerd stuff and while his maths isn’t quite up to my own levels, it’s above average. For my pet human to be able to combine maths with his new love of whisky gave him a glow that I’d not seen since 2012, when I had first started to tame and train him.
Before too long there were more humans arriving at MY apartment, and I lost a bit of attention while my pet human started doing other nerdy things with these whisky nerd humans. But I tolerated it. I understood it was time to share my pet human with other interests. It wasn’t another cat taking his time up so I wasn’t too bothered.
Then it came time for these whisky nerds to start being serious, so I carefully reviewed all their nerdy numbers (they seemed to be correct although I could have worked them out much faster than any human could have done), digested their business plan, pawed over their market strategy and gave a paws up to their idea of involving as many people as they could. My only caveat being that these humans accepted the fact that whatever they did, it had to be all about me. A few purrs, and some rolling over so they could tickle my tummy, and I’d turned all the other whisky nerds into trained humans. Which is why Nine Rivers Distillery is about Whisky CAT first, and whisky for drinking, second. The way it should be.
The Whisky Cat Impact On This Project
Aside from being the official unofficial figurehead and mascot of Nine Rivers Distillery, I’ve allowed my pet human to allocate some of his spare time (time where he’s not pandering to me) to share his talents with the other whisky nerds to do nerdy things. Apart from the obvious number crunching, my pet human has been creating a machine-based learning algorithm that will collect data points from environmental inputs on cask maturation, combine this with data from mash bills and casks types, to create the foundation baseline for being able to craft whiskies specific to the requirements of a casks owner.
The end goal is for a cask owner to say “I’d like a whisky that tastes like this, smells like this and I want it in XX this many years for bottling.” – and my pet human’s app will suggest the mash bill, the yeast strain, the fermentation time, the cask type (toast, char, previous use if relevant), the cask finish (if necessary), and then options for exactly where to mature the cask (in terms of which cask maturation warehouse, which location within that warehouse and at which heigh level) and the amount of time the whisky would need to mature to create that. Additionally suggesting options (where available) to show alternative maturation periods that can be achieve by adjusting any of these inputs. Obviously I helped with the more difficult maths underpinning this.
This is why the entire cask owners program is not only name after me, it’s a total dedication to me. Without me, Nine Rivers Distillery wouldn’t have MY pet human to do all this geeky stuff.
Where Are We Now?
I decided that there was more to the world than lazy days in the Shenzhen sun on my balcony, so I told my pet human it was time for me to travel again. I decided on the USA. I’d heard stories about a mouse called Mickey that was worthy of my attention and there’s a decent show on Broadway called CATS that I really want to check out. So I got my pet human to get onto a PhD program at Rochester Institute of Technology in New York. He’s busying himself with some mathematical modelling and teaching some calculus, while I get to soak up the atmosphere and the culture of another great city in the world. whisky cat
I’ll be taking my pet human back to China in a few years time. The U.S. is an interesting place for a sabbatical but it’s never going to be “home” to me. I already miss the pace of life in China, the diversity in people, language and culture and of course (as every Chinese cat or human will agree) THE FOOD!
As we all know, China really does have the very best food in the world and these Western attempts to cook Chinese food just don’t make the grade. Chinese food outside of China is typically sweeter and they NEVER use enough chilli. I don’t think Westerners can handle real spicy food. Their eyes start watering and their noses running on the types of things we’d have for breakfast – they could never handle a real Sichuan hot pot without crying like babies. Whisky Cat
Look me up when we get back to China.
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