Waking up hungover is terrible when you’re in college. You may be in a strange apartment, covered in marker drawings, and missing a shoe. You may still have the taste of jungle juice in your mouth. You may not remember going to Cookout at 3:30 AM and ordering six bacon cheese hot dogs. In short, it’s terrible (except for that last part, which is awesome).
Waking up hungover as an adult, though, is even worse. It hits you like a truckload of regret and sadness, and you spend hours wishing that the world would just go away.
Some things help this, of course. Water, of course. Gatorade. Crackers and toast, convincing someone else to drive you to the nearest Bojangles.
To Keith Barnofski and his business partners, though, there was another option. Something simple and delicious. Peanut butter, jacked up on caffeine. It’d be perfect, they realized, for those rough mornings after throwing one too many back or for college students in a rush to get to class. Thus, Steem Caffeinated Peanut Butter was born.
One serving of Steem (2 tbsp) has around as caffeine as a cup of coffee: a cup of coffee usually has between 80 and 135mg per 8-ounce cup while Steem comes in at 150mg per serving.
Naturally, we had to try it.
Related: Chefs Share Their Favorite Thanksgiving Dessert Recipes
To make sure the test was, as they say, scientific—we could not let you, the readers, down—our spirits writer made sure to test it under the proper conditions: the morning after a Halloween party.
The peanut butter:
The flavor, if you like/are used to natural peanut butters, is great. There is a good balance of sweet and salty that isn’t overpowering one way or the other. Steem is thick and a little gritty, but again, nothing out of the ordinary for people who have eaten natural peanut butter.
The caffeine:
The Mayo Clinic recommends up to 400mg as safe for adults. Two quick spoonfuls of Steem brings you close to that amount, without having to get out of bed and brew coffee (leaving the jar bedside seemed like the best idea ever at first sight of it that morning).
The results:
It wasn’t an immediate miracle cure, but it did help. Taking certain headache medicines is bad for you after you’ve been drinking, so this all-natural product helps on in that respect. As mentioned above, convenience is also a benefit—you don’t even need a spoon. You can just scoop some out with a finger if you’re so inclined.
Overall:
In the end, it’s easy to see why this helps with hangovers or getting to class on time or running races or any of the other times when Steem can be put into action.
For those who are a little more motivated in their anti-hangover cure procedures, check out this recipe for Five-Ingredient No-Bake Caffeinated Peanut Butter Balls from their blog:
Ingredients:
- 1 cup semi-sweet chocolate morsels
- 1 stick of salted butter
- 1 sleeve of graham crackers
- 1 cup confectioner’s sugar
- 1 jar of STEEM Caffeinated Peanut Butter
Process:
- Throw your oven down the stairs! Who needs that hunk of junk, right? You can make peanut butter bars now!
- Did you ever notice that there’s nine graham crackers in a sleeve? Not eight, not ten; nine. Anyone else think that’s weird? Anyway, use all of your bottled rage to crush the graham crackers into crumbs. Try not to get any tears of catharsis into the mixing bowl.
- Cup of confectioner’s sugar? Dump it in!
- Melt a stick of butter. And no, wiseguy, you don’t need no stinkin’ oven to melt the butter. Put it into a microwave safe bowl and nuke it for about 40 seconds. Then throw it into the mix.
- Pour the entire contents of one brave jar of STEEM into the bowl and mix until your forearm is all veiny.
- Take that big, beautiful, pasty mess out of that bowl and drop it into your lined baking pan. Press it down as evenly as you can, pushing it all the way to the corners. Make sure your hands are clean. Actually, you should have done that long before here. Are your hands clean? Go back in time and wash your hands before getting this far. Gross.
- Put a cup of semi-sweet morsels in a microwave-safe bowl (even the same one you used to melt the butter so you can get that .00001g of buttery cholesterol that was left behind) and nuke it for about 50 seconds. It’s touchy; after about 35 or 40 seconds, take the bowl out and try to stir it up a bit. After you nuke it for the last 15 seconds or so, it should be smooth enough to stir, and you’ll see quickly that the remaining morsels are melting and it should smooth out. Don’t give it a chance to harden; quickly pour it on top of your pb layer and spread it around evenly. I don’t go quite all the way to the edges of the pan with the chocolate because it’ll just get stuck to the foil on the edges and chocolate that I can’t eat is a thing that should not happen.
- Looks good, doesn’t it? Damn right it does. Now put that sucker in the fridge. The fridge is like the anti-oven. Let it set for at least an hour, more like two.
- Blow everybody’s freaking minds.
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