After enough pours, patterns start to emerge.

At first, bourbon can feel like a giant exercise in figuring out what you’re supposed to like. Somebody tells you this bottle is great, so you expect it to be great. Somebody else tells you that you need to appreciate a certain distillery, proof point or mash bill, so you try to convince yourself that you do.

Then, somewhere along the way, you start noticing what actually keeps pulling you back.

For me, there are certain flavors and profiles that consistently pull me back. I want dessert in a glass — chocolate, caramel, nutmeg, cherries and vanilla, with just enough light oak to keep everything grounded. I like bourbon that feels thick and viscous, something with real weight on the palate rather than something thin that disappears as soon as I swallow it. I can appreciate plenty of bottles outside that lane, but when I look at the bourbons I love most, that pattern keeps showing up.

Apparently, my palate has a type.

The funny thing is that this probably shouldn’t surprise me. We have types in all kinds of areas of life. Some people are Coke people. Others are Pepsi people. Ford or Chevy. McDonald’s or Chick-fil-A. Moe’s or Chipotle. We develop preferences in clothes, cars, music, food and almost everything else, and a lot of the time we simply call it brand loyalty.

But sometimes it’s more than that.

We gravitate toward certain things because something about them fits us. Maybe it’s familiarity. Maybe it’s comfort. Maybe it’s nostalgia. Maybe it’s just taste. Whatever the reason, certain things keep getting our attention.

I realized after Daryl and I got together that I had apparently been attracted to women with a certain look for years without ever consciously noticing it. Pale skin. Dark hair. Light eyes. I had never sat down and made a list. I just eventually looked backward and realized there had been a pattern there all along.

That’s probably true about more of our lives than we realize. Sometimes we don’t really know what our type is until we pay attention to what we repeatedly choose.

That’s true with bourbon, obviously. If I keep reaching for bottles with similar flavors, similar proof points and similar profiles, eventually I have to admit that my palate is trying to tell me something. I can still be surprised by something completely different. I can still enjoy a bottle that falls outside my normal lane. But knowing what I tend to like helps me understand my own taste a little better.

The same thing happens in life.

What kind of people do I enjoy being around? What kind of food do I keep ordering? What kind of music do I return to when nobody else is choosing it? What kind of clothes feel most like me? What kinds of places make me feel comfortable?

And then there’s the bigger question: what am I training myself to desire?

Psalm 34:8 says, “Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good.” That verse fits almost too perfectly into a Sunday Pour, but I think there’s something deeper there than just a convenient metaphor.

Taste develops. The first time someone drinks bourbon, they may taste little more than alcohol and burn. Over time, they start noticing caramel, vanilla, cherry, oak, tobacco, spice and all the other things hidden inside the glass. The palate becomes more discerning because it has been trained by repeated experience.

Our spiritual appetites can work the same way. What we repeatedly consume shapes what we begin to want. What we read, watch, listen to, think about and pursue can all train our appetites in one direction or another. The more we experience what is good, the easier it becomes to recognize it. The more we fill ourselves with things that are shallow, destructive or empty, the more normal those things can begin to feel.

Maybe that’s why the Bible so often talks about hunger, thirst and taste. God understands that we are creatures of appetite.

The question isn’t whether we have a type. We clearly do.

The better question is what our repeated choices are teaching us to love.

My bourbon palate definitely has a type. I’m still figuring out all the details, but after enough pours, the pattern is becoming pretty obvious.

The more important palate is the one I’m developing everywhere else.

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Copyright © 2026 Doug DeBolt.