Have put quite a bit of time into figuring out why it seems like a lot of questions on Stack Overflow and elsewhere that are open on this issue.
Currently here is my SO Q for collating and tracking these questions and this issue.
Essentially there seems to be some package conflict between a meteor and web3 dependency:
web3-empty-object-server-side-in-meteorAlso another existing thread on
Meteor forums.
The resulting problem is the 'web3' object on the server is empty '{}'. This is a known effect of node package dependency conflict/recursion/loop.
Answers