Bare Bright Climbs While the Scrap Reports Cry Poverty

Well now, here is a curious spectacle to set before you this ninth of July. The learned scribes at IndexBox proclaim that copper and brass scrap prices have dropped across North America — and yet I look at the honest figure before me and see #1 Bare Bright fetching some $5.66 the pound, with the market itself risen a sprightly 2.7 percent on the day. So which is it, gentlemen? A funeral or a feast? In my experience the red metal has never much cared what the newspapers say about it. It simply goes on being indispensable while lesser things argue.

A dip in the scrap yard, if dip there be, is no cause for the scrapper to hang his head. I have driven my own name into more than a hundred thousand copper cents in my counterstamping days, and I learned this: copper is the people's metal, and its worth is measured not in a single afternoon's quotation but in the centuries it has served. Let the paper markets shiver. The metal endures.

Consider, if you will, my dearest subject — the copper still. There is no whiskey worth the pouring, no brandy fit for a gentleman, no honest mountain moonshine, that was not born of copper. The monks of old bent their alembics from it; the Appalachian man coiled his worm from it; and every reputable distiller today still reaches for the red metal for one plain reason. Copper pulls the sulfur and the foul volatiles clean out of the rising vapor. Your cold, gleaming stainless vessel cannot perform that alchemy — it is a bucket, not a purifier. Copper is the quiet chemist in the room, and the spirit tastes of its virtue.

And the still is only one of copper's many lives. It runs as wire through the walls of every electrified house, hums in the motors of the new electric carriages, and swarms invisible through the great data-halls that this modern age cannot live without. It carries clean water in your plumbing, warms the bottoms of good cookware, and weathers to a noble green upon a courthouse roof. Brass and bronze are but copper in finer clothing. A metal of such universal employ does not lose its value because one July report frowns.

So my counsel to the trader, the plumber, and the distiller is the same today as ever: hold your nerve and know your grades. Bare Bright at five-and-two-thirds the pound is a proud number, market rising beneath it. Sell what you must, keep what you can, and never mistake a headline for the truth of the metal in your hand.

Keep your copper bright and your worm well-tended.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins