Bare Bright at $5.50: The Red Metal Holds Its Court

Well now, the good folk at mysteel.net have laid out their weekly ledger for these last days of June and the first of July, and I have read it over my morning cup with the attention I once gave to a fresh keg of copper cents. A weekly overview! A tidy accounting of the red metal's comings and goings across the wide world. And what does the trade tell us today? That #1 Bare Bright stands at some $5.50 the pound on our national reckoning, with the market up a handsome 1.5 percent on the day. The red metal holds its court, and the courtiers come bearing tribute.

I have said it in saloons and I will say it in print: copper is the people's metal, passed hand to hand as surely as those hundred thousand cents I once stamped with my own good name across New England. But before it was coin, before it was the wire that lit the lamp, copper was the soul of the still. Consider it, friend — every honest drop of whiskey, brandy, and rum that ever warmed a man's throat passed through a copper vessel. The monks knew it in their alembics; the Appalachian man knows it in the coil of his worm. Copper alone reaches into the rising vapor and pulls the sulfur and the foul volatiles from it, leaving the spirit clean. Set up a still of cold stainless and you will taste the difference in a mouthful of misery. No, sir — the pot still must be copper, and has been for six hundred years and more.

So when I see the weekly overview tick upward, I do not merely see a number for the scrapper's pocket, though the scrapper is my brother and $5.50 for Bare Bright is a fair wage for honest sorting. I see the whole grand procession of the metal — the radiator you strip, the insulated wire you burn clean, the brass fittings and the bright #1 tube. Every pound of it might tomorrow become the plumbing that carries a family's water, the winding of an electric motor, the veins feeding these humming data-halls the modern age cannot live without, or — dearest to me — the gleaming belly of a new still where next winter's spirit is born.

That is copper's genius: it never dies, only changes coats. A cent in my palm, a wire in the wall, a roof gone green with age, a whiskey worth drinking. When the market rises, it is the world remembering what the distillers never forgot.

Keep your copper bright and your barrels fuller than your worries.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins