Tatte’s close relationship with Gracenote Coffee, a Boston purveyor of creative craft coffee, began years ago. Tzurit Or, Tatte’s founder, was a devoted Gracenote fan for years, so it seemed only natural that they become our partners in the creation of our T1 Drip Blend.

Recalling the days when Tzurit was a regular mail order customer, Gracenote founder Patrick Barter, “Now I think she just gets it at Tatte. We had talked a few times over the last few years about a couple of different coffee projects. She was someone we could count on to keep coming back for our coffee. So by the time I was at a cupping table, doing coffee tastings with the Tatte team, showing our range, how we think about coffee from roasting to blending to serving… we had gotten to know each other. That made the process a lot of fun,” he adds, “because there’s been a pretty clear focus about the function of the drip coffee, what we want it to be and for whom.”

At its base, Tatte Coffee’s T1 Drip Blend is a combination of coffees sourced from two storied coffee-producing countries: Brazil and Ethiopia. 

Gracenote selects and sources the Brazilian coffee from farms multiple times a year through local contacts, based on consistency of size, price, and cup quality. “It’s not fruity or bright.” Patrick says, “Instead, it’s generous and more on the comfort-coffee side of things.” 

As Patrick tells it, over the years the teams that help him source coffee in Brazil have come to know his standards and specifications so well that they’ve been able to craft- a product exclusive to Gracenote. “We work with people there who already have long-standing relationships with a lot of the very best farmers from that region who have demonstrated an ability and an interest in investing in quality,” he says. “We’re looking for a pretty specific quality level and cup profile.”

The Ethiopian coffee is the Gracenote customer favorite “Misty Valley,” which they’ve offered since 2012: “Misty Valley has an amazing ability to do a distinctive chocolate cheesecake type of thing, along with the expected blueberry and strawberry notes, too. It’s slightly floral and has a more effervescent quality, so the weight of it makes it really satisfying. It doesn’t taste too juicy or tea-like, like some Ethiopian coffees do. It fits in this blend very well.”

But where does that mysterious name come from? Misty Valley, it turns out, is a bit of a legend in the coffee industry. “About fifteen years ago,” Patrick recalls, “there was a farm called Misty Valley that changed the specialty coffee game at the time with its really dynamic and clear naturally processed coffee. They were working with coffee that was really fruity, but hard to work with because there wasn’t much control over how they were dried and sorted. Then, whether it was luck or tons of trial-and-error, they suddenly made a coffee crop for a few years that blew everyone away. It had all these rich qualities but tasted clean and was free of defects. It was a coffee that brought a lot of regular, everyday coffee drinkers into specialty coffee. Coffee professionals were saying, ‘I didn’t know coffee could be like this.’”

But for some reason, the farm—and the coffee associated with it—has been missing from the scene. Misty Valley lived only in memories for almost ten years until someone finally determined to recreate it. “Someone from the Yirgacheffe region of Ethiopia went looking, not for the farm, but to resurrect the flavor profile of the original coffee. After working on it for a while, they were able to recreate it by blending coffees from this or that farm to recreate that unique fruited cheesecake quality. It’s a really dazzling coffee and it tastes consistent. It has this character that I just don’t find anywhere else.”

In T1, Misty Valley shines forth with nuance, and an elegant balance of fruit and chocolate tones. “It’s a blend that doesn’t demand attention,” Patrick notes, “but rewards it.”

Once the beans are sourced, Gracenote receives them at their roastery in Upton. A good roaster has got to be a good taster,” Patrick says. “With Gracenote, it’s not so much that we know exactly how each coffee is going to respond in the roaster. It’s that we know how to taste coffee and bring out the balance and elegance we’re looking for without creating any new problems.” “Sometimes,” he adds, “we’ll get a new coffee, and it’ll take us quite a few batches to come up with a roast that we really like. That can be a bummer, because that can be hundreds of pounds of coffee that don’t go to customers.” 

Patrick wishes coffee drinkers in general could know more about the many nuances behind the roasting process so they could steer clear of coffee that’s been roasted in a way that they may not enjoy. “Out in the world, it doesn’t seem like many people talk about roast. We would love to somehow help inform people about this so that they confidently tell whether something’s weird with the coffee itself, the roast, or how it was brewed. If a coffee tastes astringent, or like sucking on a tea bag or the fruit within the coffee flavor tastes under ripe or it tastes metallic or saccharin… it’s not them failing to appreciate the coffee, those are qualities that with a fairly high degree of confidence can be blamed on the roaster. And there’s a lot of it out there–which sadly can undermine someone’s confidence in themselves or in specialty coffee in general.”

Patrick started Gracenote in 2015, teaching himself how to roast. Prior to that, he had a career as a software developer,which unexpectedly sprang from a formal education as a jazz musician and composer. In fact, music plays a huge role in both the name and the ethos of his company. “In musical terms, the grace note is an ornament or an embellishment. It’s a sub-note even though it’s written above the note, and together, the grace note changes the emphasis on and ornaments the central note. Ornaments or embellishments can emphasize either themselves or what they’re decorating, and a sensitivity to that balance is what we’re trying to bring to our roasting” he says. “We want these notes to be ornamental and supportive, rather than central and insensitive to their context within the cup of coffee. Part of doing a great job with coffee is making the whole thing work together really nicely.”

Gracenote has a café in Boston’s Leather District and another that serves wine and coffee cocktails as well as their incredible coffee in the High Street Place Food Hall. In addition to their brick and mortar establishments, you can visit their website, gracenotecoffee.com, to purchase coffee and enroll in their coffee subscription program.

We had one final question for Patrick: as someone with a professional connection to coffee, what does it mean to him personally? “I wake up and want to be able to understand more deeply, to be able to influence in a more beautiful way.. “I feel like a servant of the product and the process. It’s another day and I’m trying to figure out which of six different options is the most beautiful one. And maybe I’ll make a mistake in the process that I’ll learn even more from.”

As for people at home who don’t quite aspire to roasting coffee but who want to find a more personal or engaged approach, he suggests they do a little experimenting—and tasting, of course. “Change the temperature of the water you use by a degree or two, or ten. Don’t always make small changes–they’re harder to taste. Observe what you like and what you like less. Use filtered water if you don’t already, and give yourself time to taste for the differences in flavor.” And of course, the surest way to create a masterpiece? “Have some fun with it–and pay close attention. Relaxed, and alert.”

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