A Stalemate in the Red Metal: Volatility, Scarcity & the Still

The gentlemen of the Shanghai Metals Market send word that the copper scrap trade sits in a curious deadlock this May — high volatility and structural constraints, they call it, a fine and fancy phrase for the oldest standoff in commerce: those who hold copper will not part with it cheaply, and those who need copper cannot do without it. So the two sides eye one another across the scale like poker players who both know they hold aces.

Here upon our own shores the honest scrapper finds his #1 Bare Bright fetching about $6.23 the pound — a handsome price for the people's metal, the same red metal I once drove my name into by the hundred thousand, one copper cent at a time. I know something of the tug between holding and selling; a man learns it the moment he watches a coin pass hand to hand across a saloon bar and wonders whether to spend it or keep it.

Now, why should a stalemate half a world away trouble the distiller, the plumber, the wireman? Because copper is never idle. Every ounce hoarded in a warehouse is an ounce not drawn into a whiskey worm, not soldered into a water line, not spun into the windings of an electric motor. The world's appetite for the red metal has never been greater — the electric carriages, the humming data-halls, the roofs that weather to that noble green — and appetite meeting scarcity is precisely the recipe for the wild swings the Shanghai men describe.

But let me speak, as I always must, of copper's finest calling. The alembic. The pot still. From the monastery cellars of the old monks to the Appalachian moonshiner crouched over his fire, the craft has trusted one metal above all — because copper alone reaches into the rising vapor and seizes the sulfur, the foul volatiles, the bite that would ruin a spirit. Line your still in cold stainless steel and you'll draw off liquor that tastes of struck matches and regret. Copper makes good liquor possible. It always has. Centuries of clean brandy and honest whiskey are copper's quiet testimony, and no market stalemate has ever changed that chemistry.

So my counsel this volatile May is the distiller's counsel: patience and good copper. Prices will lurch and traders will glower across their scales, but the metal itself keeps its old virtues. It conducts the lightning, it carries the water, it purifies the drink. Hold your grade honest — Bare Bright bright, brass sorted from radiator — and the market will find you.

Keep your still copper and your dealings square.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins