The rest of Europe has been worrying a great deal recently about the delivery of oil and gas from Russia, but in the thirstier parts of the Baltic states they have concerns about a rather different sort of pipeline.

Eleven men have appeared in court in Estonia charged with evading taxes by smuggling homemade vodka through a mile-long underwater tube. Prosecutors say that at least 6,200 litres (1,360 gallons) of illegal spirits had been pumped through the plastic pipeline, laid at the bottom of a reservoir that separates the Estonian town of Narva from Ivangorod in Russia.

The smugglers taped together hundreds of short lengths of plastic tubing to create the pipe, in a feat of engineering and perseverance that enabled them to avoid 900,000 Estonian crowns (about £45,000) in excise duty.

Their plot began to unravel when they tried to sell the first consignment of Russian moonshine in Tallinn, the Estonian capital. Despite the huge market for cheap vodka – and a general disregard for the well-known health risks – even the city’s hard-bitten drinkers rejected the black market spirit as unquaffable and an alleged gang member was caught with 1,159 litres of unwanted illegal alcohol in the back of a lorry.

But having constructed the world’s longest straw the smugglers were determined to find a market for their product. “They transported their cargo back to Narva and later managed to sell it in Tartu, the second-largest town in Estonia,” Mari Luuk, spokes-woman for the Viru circuit prosecutor’s office in Estonia, said, adding primly: “It was illegally made and the quality was not what we usually have from vodka in Estonia.”

Bootleg vodka regularly causes health scares in the Baltic states. In the last serious case in 2001, at least 67 people died from drinking an illicit spirit to which methanol had been added to boost its alcoholic content. The scandal moved Lennart Meri, then the President of Estonia, to call the widespread tolerance of vodka-smuggling a national disgrace. “This is the legacy of the Soviet-era way of living and our shame,” he said.

Moonshine – in most cases to call it “vodka” is to do it a service – is big business in the region: at least one in five of the 1.4 million Estonians is thought to buy illegally distilled alcohol, depriving the state of about £5 million a year in duty – not to mention several people of their lives.

A survey for the journalAlcohol and Alcoholism in 2006 classified 46.4 per cent of Estonia’s male population as heavy drinkers. This was a higher rate than in either of its Baltic neighbours, Latvia and Lithuania, but lower than Russia, where 53.2 per cent of men are classed as heavy drinkers.

In both Russia and Estonia vodka-drinking is a cultural essential. In Estonia, however, which joined the EU in 2004, it has become much more expensive, with a bottle costing three times the price across the border. “It might sound weird and unbelievable but it is a very real criminal case,” Ms Luuk said. “The reservoir is not very deep but they would still have needed some boats to put this pipeline in place.”

The pipeline gang was active in 2004 but has only now been charged. The members face up to five years in prison, but their capture does not seem to have deterred others.

Ms Luuk said: “It is not the only time that this method has been used to smuggle vodka. In 2006 there was an even longer pipe found – 2.5km (1½ miles) – but the Border Guard investigated and said that it had not yet been used.”

The Estonians still have some way to go to beat the Baltic record. In 2004 an underground plastic pipeline was discovered in Lithuania that had been bringing vodka more than 3km across the border from Belarus.

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