As an electrical engineer, Jeremy Raymer used to spend his days poring over schematics and such. As of last week, though, he's found a new line of work — "pour-over" coffee, which he brews to order at a cart on Pitt's campus.
Raymer, a Pitt grad who grew up in Glassport, opened Jeremy's Cart, featuring Blue Bottle Coffee, on Mon., Oct. 28. It's no grab-it-and-go coffee fix; the pour-over method, with each cup brewed individually, takes a few minutes, but results in much greater depth of flavor. Raymer has a few kettles of hot water going at any given time, and he and the cart's other worker, Jared Pavlecic, take turns performing the specialized task of the pour — which they learned through trainings in Brooklyn and San Francisco. The cart serves coffee from Blue Bottle, a roaster founded in the early 2000s by a former symphony musician in San Francisco.
Perhaps a brick-and-mortar location is in the cards for Raymer someday, and occasionally he'll work events like this Saturday's Smorgasburgh pop-up food event at 23rd and Smallman, in the Strip. But for now, the cart, which sits in front of the William Pitt Union on Bigelow Boulevard daily from 7:30 a.m. to 2 p.m., is Raymer's only location — its red umbrella is its main safeguard against the weather.
That's fine by Raymer. "I was so tired of being cooped up in a construction trailer" as an engineer, he says. "I love being out here among all these people."
