A trio of foodies claim to have come up with an answer to the binge drinker's lament, "When is somebody going to invent a hangover cure?"
What they came up with is a caffeinated peanut butter called Steem.
"The idea stemmed from a conversation about trying to come up with a good hangover cure," said Andrew Brach, who was cogitating the concept a few years ago with friends Keith Barnofski and Chris Pettazzoni.
Of course, the fabled, sought-after hangover cure remains a mystery to modern science, though there are various ways to alleviate the pain.
Brach said they were talking about experimenting with a banana bread peanut butter sandwich with sprinkled bacon on it when they had the "light bulb moment" that they should put caffeine in the peanut butter.
They put Barnofski's sous chef skills to work and devised a way to caffeinate peanut butter. Brach said they mixed green-coffee extract and natural agave sweetener into peanut butter. He said the caffeine gets extracted from the green coffee bean and mixes with the fat of the peanut butter.
"It's a slower release of energy," he said. "That way you don't get the sugar crash."
He said that two tablespoons of Steem is equal to two cups of coffee.
It look about two years to turn the concept into a jar of Steem ready for sale. He said they rented out a food processing facility at a community center in Greenfield, Mass., and since their launch in March 2014 they've sold nearly 6,000 jars.
Steem is sold online for $4.99 and it's also sold in stores in parts of Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Hampshire.
The company web site suggests eating it on crackers, toast or fruit, or as the classic peanut butter sandwich, "or just jam a knife or a spoon or a finger into the jar and eat it like you do when no one's looking."
