Bare Bright at $5.77: The Red Metal Holds Its Court

Step near the assay bench, friends, for the ledgers have come in from the far side of the world. Mysteel Global sends word of the copper scrap trade for the week of June the twenty-ninth through the third of July, and I have read it as I once read the faces of men across my tooth-pulling chair — with keen and hopeful attention.

Here at home the honest measure stands: #1 Bare Bright at about $5.77 the pound. A handsome number, and a fitting one, for I have never known the red metal to sell itself cheap when the whole clattering machine of the modern age depends upon it. The weekly overviews may fret and flutter, but copper does what copper has always done — it holds its court while other metals come and go.

Let me remind you why this matters to more than the scrapper's scale. Copper is the metal that makes good liquor possible. Long before your grandfather's grandfather, the monks in their stone cellars bent copper into alembics, and the moonshiner in his Appalachian hollow ran his vapor through a copper worm for the very same reason: copper cleanses the spirit. It seizes upon the sulfur and the foul volatiles rising in the still and binds them fast, so that what drips from the condenser is clean whiskey, clean brandy, clean rum. A stainless vessel cannot perform this quiet alchemy — it is deaf to the chemistry. Every distiller worth his mash knows to lay hands on copper, and so a strong scrap market is, in its way, a rumor of good drinking to come.

And copper does not rest there. The same red metal strung upon the poles carries the lightning of civilization into every parlor. It runs in the water lines beneath your floor, gleams on the bottoms of the cook's finest pans, and greens gracefully upon the roofs of proud buildings. In this age of humming electric carriages and those vast halls they call data centers — great cathedrals of thought fed on wire — the appetite for copper only swells. The overview from abroad is but one gauge of a hunger that will not soon be sated.

In my counterstamping days I drove my name into a hundred thousand copper cents, and I did it because copper was the people's metal — passed hand to hand across every saloon bar and eating-house counter in New England, my own Fort Wilkins among them, caged bear and all. It is still the people's metal. Sort your grades honestly, weigh your #1 and your #2 true, and bring your Bare Bright to the buyer with your chin up.

The red metal endures, and so, I trust, shall we.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins