31 litres of lager in 24 hours

Much as I love this beer
I doubt I could have
matched Maurice Healey
 in a boozing contest

One of the books I am currently working on is an anthology of some of the best writing on beer from across the centuries and featuring writers from around the world. This is something I found in a wine-focused book called Stay Me With Flagons, which was published in 1940 by Maurice Healey. This is from the chapter headed Beer and Cider. 
     

‘Lager seems to owe its otherness to the method of its fermentation. When after the last war I was trying to get beer for the troops in Germany I got one letter which spoke of “our by-a-special-process-top-and-bottom-fermented-beer.’ I felt it must be good with a description like that; and I ordered a consignment. It was good. English beer, on the other hand, is apparently only fermented form below. Also, hops are supposed to play a large part in English beer; I do not think that lager contains hops, but it usually betrays the presence of more than a touch of garlic. I know of no scientific reason why lager should demand icing to be served in perfection, while English draught beer is undoubtedly harmed if its temperature is brought down to anything below what would be described as coo. Our beers are more potent, also; ‘One over the right’ is a phrase to indicate drunkenness, whereas I have myself put away 31 litres of German lager  in one twenty-four hours, without being conscious of any evil effect. I may add that this statement so shocked the editor of The Listener that he twice cut it out of my contributions to a teetotal controversy in the columns of his paper. But there is really nothing to it. The late Father Tom Finlay, one of the wisest of men, once told me that when he as a young Jesuit went to Munich to pursue his studies, the Master of Novices addressed the young arrivals in friendly warning: ‘You will like our beer,’ he said; ‘and you will perhaps be tempted to drink more of it than is good for you, not knowing its powers. Well, I would counsel you to set yourself a limit, and not to exceed that. You may not know what limit to set yourselves; my own limit is 17 litres a day, if that will serve you as a guide.’ So I think that a tourist on holiday at a more mature age need not be ashamed of having merely doubled this minimum.’