A Whisker's Dip in the Red Metal — Bare Bright Holds at $5.82

Friends and fellow handlers of the red metal, I have read the day's ledger and find it delightfully undramatic. The wire service tells us that copper and stainless steel have dipped — a mere twotenths of one percent — while most every other category sits placid as a pond at dawn. Bare Bright, that gleaming #1 grade the scrapper prizes above his own good name, fetches about $5.82 the pound. A whisker's decline. I have counterstamped a hundred thousand cents that jostled worse than this in a saloon till.

Let me put such a dip in its proper light. Copper does not swoon over a fraction of a percent, for copper is the most patient of metals. It has been passed hand to hand as the coin of common men, hammered into roofs that greened over cathedrals, and drawn into the wire that now feeds the humming data-halls and the electric carriages of this restless age. A twentieth of a nickel's wobble is nothing to a metal with such a curriculum vitae.

But you know where my heart truly resides, and it resides in the still. Consider, when you hear of stainless steel dipping alongside our copper, that no distiller of sense ever trusted his spirit to steel alone. The monastery alembic was copper. The moonshiner's worm, coiled cold behind the shed, was copper. Why? Because the red metal reaches into the vapor and seizes the sulfur, dragging out the foul volatiles that would otherwise sour your whiskey and turn your brandy to bile. Stainless is a fine cold shoulder — it holds and it cleans — but it is a bystander in the chemistry. Copper is the alchemist in the coppersmith's coat, and it has clarified every honest dram from the alembics of the friars to the pot stills of Kentucky.

So when the numbers dip, I do not fret; I raise a glass distilled by grace of copper and toast the steadiness of the trade. The plumber's line, the motor's windings, the cookware bright at its base, the radiator you strip and sort — all of it holds its worth because the world cannot run, nor drink well, without our metal.

My counsel for the day: if you have Bare Bright, it is priced fair at $5.82, and a fraction's slip is no cause to dump the load in a panic. Sort clean, keep your brass from your #2, and let the honest weight speak. Copper always comes back to itself — it is, after all, the metal that makes good liquor possible.

Keep your coils bright and your cup fuller than your worries.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins