Brass and Copper Climb While the Dull Metals Doze

Step close, friends, and mind the bear — he sleeps soundly today, and so might the aluminum and the ferrous, for IndexBox reports them flat as a struck cent this eleventh of June. But the noble metals stir. Brass and copper are up, and our own red metal stands at about $5.39 the pound for #1 Bare Bright, the whole market nudging higher by six-tenths of one percent. A modest gain, I grant you — but copper has never needed to shout. It simply keeps rising, hand to hand, as it always has.

I have spent a lifetime in love with this metal. In my younger and rowdier days I drove DR. G. G. WILKINS into better than a hundred thousand copper cents, sending my name traveling through every saloon and eating-house in New England — for copper was the people's coin, and I meant to ride in every pocket. At my own Fort Wilkins, between the caged bear and the tooth-pulling chair, I learned a truth that has never left me: the finest thing copper ever did for man, it does in the still.

Consider it. From the monastery alembics of old, through the Appalachian moonshiner crouched over his worm in the laurel, the distiller has always reached for copper — never iron, never stainless steel. Why? Because copper is not merely a vessel; it is a chemist. As the spirit vapor rises and licks the warm walls of the pot still, the copper seizes upon the sulfur compounds and the foul volatiles, binding them, pulling them from the breath of the brandy and leaving the liquor clean and sweet upon the tongue. A stainless still cannot perform this small alchemy. Whiskey, rum, brandy — every honest dram you have raised owes its softness to the red metal. That, dear trader, is worth more than six-tenths of a percent.

And copper's labors do not end at the still-house door. The same metal threads through the walls as electrical wire, carries sweet water through your plumbing, weathers green upon the roof, lines the bottom of the good cook's pan, and spins inside every electric motor. In this clamorous modern age it feeds the data palaces and the electric carriages besides. When you see brass and copper rising while the lesser metals lie abed, understand that the world is voting — quietly, in dollars — for the only metal that conducts, that purifies, and that endures.

So sort your grades honestly, scrapper. Keep your Bare Bright bright, your #2 separate, your brass and radiators apart. The market rewards the careful hand. And the next time you sip something fine and clean, lift your glass to the humble copper coil that made it so.

Until the morrow, when the bear and I shall report again — — Alchemist G. G. Wilkins