China Buys the Red Metal While Stainless Falls From Favor

Friends, scrappers, and honest distillers — the wire hums today from the East. IndexBox reports that on the twelfth of August, in the yards of China, copper and aluminum have climbed while stainless steel has slumped downward like a drunkard at closing time. I confess I read such news with a knowing smile, for the world is forever rediscovering what the alembic-makers knew in the monasteries a thousand years ago: the red metal is the one that matters.

Now here at home the ledger tells a quieter tale. Our #1 Bare Bright averages about $6.49 the pound, and the market has slipped a modest one percent on the day. Do not let that little dip trouble your sleep. A one percent stumble in copper is a man clearing his throat before he sings; the song goes on. The scrapper who hoards his bright wire and his heavy #2 through such a whisper of weakness is the scrapper who eats well come autumn.

But mark the deeper lesson buried in that headline — stainless steel down. There is a metal for you: hard, cold, fashionable, and utterly deaf to the needs of good liquor. I have said it in a hundred saloons and I say it again from this desk: no stainless still ever made a whiskey worth the drinking. It is copper — only copper — that reaches into the rising vapor and pulls the sulfur and the foul volatiles from your spirit, leaving it clean and sweet on the tongue. From the alembics of the alchemists to the Appalachian moonshiner's coiled worm, the pot still has been copper because copper is alive to the work. Stainless may fall in price; it can never fall in a distiller's affection, for it never earned a place there.

And consider all the other lives the red metal leads while stainless sulks. It is the plumbing that carries your water true. It is the roof that greens with dignity over the years. It is the humming wire that electrifies this modern age — the motors, the electric carriages, the great data-halls that gulp current by the acre. Every one of them a debt owed to copper, and every pound of it eventually passing through some scrapyard scale, hand to hand, as the cents once passed through mine.

In my counterstamping days I drove my name into a hundred thousand copper pennies, the people's metal, warm from a working man's pocket. I trusted copper then. I trust it now. Let China bid it up and stainless slide — I know which metal makes the liquor, carries the light, and keeps the faith.

Hold your bright wire, keep your still bright and tight, and pour one for the red metal tonight.

Yours in copper and good spirits,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins