A Red Tumble Out of China, and the Still Stands Firm

Step closer to the table, friends, and mind the bear — he is in a foul humor today, and so, it seems, is the copper market. Word arrives from the eastern shore that on this twenty-fourth of June, the scrap yards of China sent their numbers in a muddle: copper and aluminum sliding downward, while stainless steel — that pale, soulless cousin — had the impudence to climb. And here at home our own #1 Bare Bright sits at about $5.38 the pound, the whole market off some 4.8 percent on the day. A bruising, I'll grant you.

But I have driven my own name into more than a hundred thousand copper cents in my counterstamping days, and I tell you a man does not panic at a single bad afternoon. Copper has been falling and rising since the first smith pulled it red from the fire. A 4.8 percent dip is the metal catching its breath, no more.

Let the stainless men crow. I have stood in a thousand stillhouses and I have never once seen a craftsman of spirits trust his nose to stainless. The pot still, the alembic, the moonshiner's worm coiling through the cold trough — these are copper, and copper alone, because copper is the only metal that listens. As the vapor rises hot from the wash, the red metal reaches out and seizes the sulfur, the foul-smelling volatiles, the rankness that would ruin a dram. Stainless lets it all pass through clean and lifeless. The monastery brothers knew it with their brandy; the Appalachian man in his hollow knows it still. A falling price only means the wise distiller buys his still cheaper this week.

And consider where else the red metal labors while the traders fret. It runs the wires that electrify every town and carriage; it lines the water mains beneath our streets; it greens the roofs and gutters into noble verdigris; it warms the bottoms of the good cookware and turns the motors of this humming modern age — aye, even the great data houses that drink electricity like my old saloon patrons drank rye. A metal of that many lives does not stay cheap for long.

So if you are a scrapper hauling #1 and #2, your insulated wire and your bright brass, do not let a foreign dispatch sour you. Sort honest, weigh honest, and hold what you can. The market that fell today has fallen ten thousand times before and risen ten thousand and one. Copper is the people's metal — passed hand to hand, hammered into coin, coiled into the worm that makes good liquor possible.

Keep your faith and your file sharp. The red metal endures.

Yours in copper and clear spirits,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins