BERLIN, PA -- His hands are bloated from arthritis and his legs stiff from years spent on his knees digging in western Pennsylvania coal pits. But Paul William Custer, 71, says he fights the effects of old age by staying in motion, butchering deer and cows in a shop behind his house and indulging in a hobby learned from his four uncles: cooking up an occasional batch of bootleg whiskey.
He claims to have given up drinking years ago and limits his intake of moonshine to a sip or two when he suffers from a cold. "I keep a little four-ounce bottle by my bed in case I get a cough," he said. He scoffs at his wife for preferring store-bought cough drops.
State Police arrested Custer after a six-month undercover sting operation. In a preliminary hearing in Meyersdale last Monday, District Justice Robert Philson ordered Custer to stand trial for possessing, making and selling liquor without a license.
Custer doesn't deny breaking the law.
"It was more or less an open-and-shut case," he said.
What galls him is that someone fingered him as a bootlegger and that police spent six months' worth of taxpayer money trying to catch him. But like a distant ancestor, Gen. George Armstrong Custer, who died with his command at the Battle of Little Big Horn, he wants to fire a parting shot or two at whoever tipped police off.
"If I ever find out who it is, I'll break his knee caps."
Custer operated a still for several years in his butcher shop outside the village of Berlin, 90 miles southeast of Pittsburgh in a rolling landscape of hayfields and dairy farms.
Custer said a stranger came to him in the spring and asked him to butcher some beef. The customer returned several times, finally asking Custer if he knew how to make moonshine.
The man was an undercover police officer.
"He said he was broke and needed to make a little money," Custer said. "He kept visiting, and I said I'd show him, and that's where I made my mistake."
Custer showed the officer a still, cooling tanks and two 55-gallon plastic drums containing mash and a clear liquid in a side room at his butcher's shop, police said.
The undercover officer was able to gain Custer's trust by mentioning that he made homemade wine and suggesting that he might sell Custer some, Hickes said. The liquor bureau stated in its criminal complaint that Custer sold the officer a gallon of moonshine on July 30 and an additional quart on Sept. 29.
Custer said he usually distilled about 10 gallons of moonshine a year, using a still in a kitchen next to the room where his workers slice into animal carcasses with electric chain saws.
Jack Meyers, a butcher who works with Custer, said the moonshine was "crystal clear," owing in part to the clean shop they ran, Meyers said.
Custer's recipe calls for shelled wheat kernels, sugar, yeast and water. He cooks the concoction for six hours and distills it for four more.
"Some people use rye or corn," he said. "Wheat makes a better whiskey. It goes down smoother."
Custer sold his whiskey for $35 a gallon, a bargain compared to what he said was the standard price of $50 a gallon in neighboring West Virginia.
Custer bragged abut the quality of his liquor, which laboratory tests found to range from 84 to 90 proof, the complaint said.
"That's wrong. I always kept it at 110 proof," Custer said, bristling at the slight against his workmanship.