Friends, scrappers, and you patient distillers waiting on a fresh worm — the press has handed us a headline of gloom. IndexBox reports the scrap market sagging in these last days of June 1926 — copper, aluminum, brass, zinc, and steel all sliding down the page together, like patrons stumbling out of my old Fort Wilkins at closing time.
But read the fine print, as a counterstamper learns to do. While the broad scrap report tells of decline, the red metal herself is up 1.3% on the day, and honest #1 Bare Bright is fetching some $5.44 the pound at the national scale. So let the steel and zinc grumble in the cheap seats — copper has taken her bow and stepped forward. She always does. A metal that conducts the lightning and carries the water does not stay down for long.
And here is where I must turn, as I always must, to copper and spirits — my dearest subject. Every man who has run a clean batch knows the secret: it is not the steel that makes the whiskey sing. Stainless gives you tonnage and a cold shine, but it gives back every foul sulfur note the mash can muster. Copper pulls the poison out. The red metal grips those rank volatiles in the rising vapor and lets only the sweet spirit pass to the worm. The monastery alembic knew it. The Appalachian moonshiner with his battered pot still knows it. Centuries of fine brandy and clean corn liquor are written in copper, not steel — and no dip in a June scrap report changes that chemistry one whit.
So a soft market is no cause for the long face. To the distiller, it means your next still-head, your next coil of fresh tubing, comes a touch cheaper to assemble — and copper bought low still does the work of kings. To the scrapper, it means the wise hand holds his Bare Bright and watches the tape, for today's 1.3% rise is the metal reminding the doubters who runs this trade.
Consider all her other lives while you wait: the wire feeding the great electrification, the plumbing behind your walls, the green-roofed banks weathering handsomely overhead, the motors humming in every modern carriage and machine. A market may price all metals in one breath, but copper alone touches your light, your water, your cookware, and — bless her — the very glass you raise tonight.
Hold steady. The page dips; the metal endures. Pour something clean and drink to the red conductor.
Yours in copper and good spirits,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins
Penned in response to the day’s copper news from IndexBox.