The funny screensaver where a pint of stout pours

Stout pour is the comedy one in Screensavers by Zaweba. An unbranded pint of stout pours with a surge, settles black under a creamy head, and is then drunk in gulps, leaving foam rings down the glass. A dim bar shows behind it, and then the pint is poured again.

It's a small joke that gets funnier the longer you leave it, because the cycle never ends. The glass is always being refilled, and somebody unseen is always thirsty.

The pour, the settle and the gulps

Anyone who has waited at a bar knows the ritual. The stout surges into the glass, cloudy and pale, then slowly settles into a dark body with a white head on top. The screensaver plays that out at its own pace. Then come the gulps, each leaving a ring of foam on the inside of the glass, until it's empty and the barman starts again.

The glass is unbranded on purpose. It isn't any particular brewery's pint, just the idea of one, drawn by Zaweba's own code.

There's nothing more to it than that, and that's the point. Most screensavers are pretty. This one is meant to make someone smile when they walk past your desk.

The three settings

Speed sets how quickly the whole cycle runs. Slow is closer to real life and more patient; fast turns it into a bit of slapstick. How long the bar shows sets, in seconds, how long the dim bar behind is visible. Bar lamp colour changes the warm light in the background, so you can make the bar cosy amber or something cooler.

Watch the live preview in the manager as you change each one. A slower speed with a warm lamp is the most convincing.

Pulling the first pint on your PC

Open Screensavers by Zaweba and choose Stout pour from the night pack. Once the settings feel right, press Preview full screen to see a pint at full size, and press a key or click to get back. Press Use this screensaver to build it into your Windows profile; no administrator rights are needed. Windows' Screen Saver Settings then opens, where you select it, set the wait time and decide whether to ask for a password on resume.

Nothing needs rebuilding later. Change the speed or the lamp colour in the manager and the next run uses the new settings.

Good places for it

A home bar, a club computer, a staff room or a screen at a party all suit Stout pour. With more than one monitor, the several monitors setting lets you show one pint on each screen, which makes a row of pints, or stretch one across all of them, or keep it on the main monitor with the others black.

It also mixes well with other night pack screensavers. Poker deal, with cards sliding onto felt, keeps the pub theme going. Tick both and use Install several, and the screensaver picks one at random each time the PC goes idle.

A light touch

Stout pour is only a joke, and it's meant to be taken that way. Like the rest of the pack, it's free software under the EULA, runs offline and needs no account. The drinking is entirely on screen.