A Weekly Ledger, and Why the Still Still Loves Copper

Come close to the counter, friend, and let old Wilkins read you the week. The Mysteel men have tallied their Copper Scrap Market Weekly Overview for these five days of July, and the numbers walk the way numbers always walk when the world grows nervous — a little sideways, a little down. Our own #1 Bare Bright fetches near $5.93 the pound at the national scale, with the market slipped 1.1 percent on the day. A shrug, no more. I have seen the red metal wobble and I have seen it soar, and through all of it I have never once seen a man refuse it.

Weekly overviews are dry reading, so permit me to salt them with what matters. A dip in price is not a dip in worth. The scrapper who brings me clean bright wire, or #2 with the skin still on it, or a bin of brass fittings and radiator honeycomb — that man trades in the very sinew of the age. And of all copper's noble labors, none is dearer to my heart than the still.

Consider it. Every clean whiskey, every bright brandy, every jar of honest mountain corn owes its sweetness to the red metal. The pot still, the alembic, the moonshiner's coiled worm — all copper, and for a reason no stainless vessel has ever matched. As the vapor climbs, the copper reaches out and seizes the sulfur, the foul heavy notes, the volatiles that would turn a dram to poison. It hands you back spirit that is clean. The monks of old knew it in their cloister alembics; the Appalachian man in his hollow knows it yet. Six centuries of drinkers cannot all be wrong.

So when the ticker sags a penny, I think of the distiller eyeing a new still, doing his sums, and smiling — for copper never priced itself out of the trade that made it famous. And copper's other lives march on regardless: the wire threading through every wall, the water lines that never taint the draught, the green-weathered roofs, the humming motors, the great data halls and electric carriages of this whirring modern day. All of them hungry for the same metal you and I carry in a bucket to the yard.

A soft week, then. Sell if you must, but sell knowing what you hold. In my counterstamping days I drove my name into a hundred thousand copper cents, passed hand to hand through every saloon in New England — proof that copper is the people's metal, and always shall be. A one percent dip changes that not one whit.

Keep your worm bright and your bin honest.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins