We’ve held for as long as we can stand it without posting yet another football World Cup gadget, until we came across this curious Beer Butler from the Gadget Store. 

The Beer Butler gadget features a sliding base shaped like a football. When someone needs a fresh drink, you simply load it up and give it a shove in your drinking partner’s direction. The remarkable thing about this gadget is that as it approaches the edge of the table, it stops without going over the edge – but how?

Perhaps you can imagine the situation. Your friend on the other side of the table needs a beer, and you give a bottle a shove in his or her general direction. The problem is you’ve one eye on the football, and in any case after a few beers, your hand to eye co-ordination isn’t perhaps as good as it needs to be, and the beer can too easily overshoot and end up on the floor. The manufacturers of the Beer Butler claim that with this gadget this can’t happen and that “…it will ingeniously stop when it reaches the edge without spilling a drop!” But I’m really wondering how that can work.

Perhaps you can program it to travel a fixed distance, (say the width of the table), before stopping – but what happens if you need to pass the beer diagonally?

Anyway, what happens if it does overshoot and lands on the carpet? Do you get a refund on your £14?

If anyone has bought one of these or has seen one working, we’d really appreciate it if you could let us know how it works.