The Insane Amount Of Alcohol That Andre The Giant Would Drink Every Day

We all have that one heavyweight friend who proudly boasts about drinking us under the table, who treats drinking alcohol not as a mere social event, but as part of a decathlon. The one who puts all the red-faced featherweights to shame through Olympian feats of imbibation. Or at least, they think so, until they're passed out on the floor from pushing too hard, too fast. Such contests of machismo, will, foolishness, whatever you call it, are not new at all. In fact, Alexander the Great once held a drinking competition to try and bring Greek and Persian cultures together, where all 41 contenders, including winner Promachus the soldier who drank 4 gallons of undiluted wine, died from alcohol poisoning, per Vintage News.

There was one person, though, who was truly capable of absurd, godly feats of alcohol consumption: wrestler and actor Andre the Giant. Born André René Roussimoff in Grenoble, France, the 7' 4", 520-pound titan not only gained notoriety for transforming his painful, somewhat debilitating condition of acromegaly (gigantism in children) into a world-renowned wrestling career in the WWF, and for his legendary turn in The Princess Bride (1987), but for being able to drink an absolutely shocking amount of alcohol. The more mundane of his feats includes drinking the entire stock of an airplane on one flight from Chicago to Japan, and drinking *only* five bottles of wine with dinner every night in order to slim down to a shiek 475 pounds, as reported by Thrillist.

Aside from such comparatively mild, nightly drinking, Andre was responsible for truly mythic matches of man vs. massive quantities of alcohol. While filming The Princess Bride, for example, Andre rang up a $40,000 tab at the Hyatt in London from ordering a drink he referred to as an "American," which was basically a no-holds-barred cistern of liquor after liquor all mixed together that Andre guzzled like water. 

But even this display might be nothing next to the time he drank an entire case of wine in the back of a bus in a mere three hours. As Hulk Hogan recounted, the bus ride was eight hours long, started at 8:00 in the morning, and by 11:00 all twelve bottles were gone and Andre was tapping Hogan on the shoulder and saying that he had to use the bathroom. Another time, Andre (yes, this is true), drank 119 12-ounce bottles of beer in six hours, which is roughly one beer every 3-minutes, non-stop. Oh, and he also once drank 40 vodka tonics in a row until 4 am in order to avoid getting kicked out of a bar for not drinking.

In some ways, it seems natural that such a larger than life person — physically and otherwise — would be drawn to such choices. Perhaps this gentle giant simply couldn't find an adequate foe outside of the pantheon of Mt. Olympus.