China Lifts the Red Metal Again as Bare Bright Holds $5.35

Step closer, friends, for the wire hums with good news this morning. The reports out of China tell us scrap prices have all risen together — copper, aluminum, even that pale and stubborn stainless steel — and our own honest American yards answer in kind. #1 Bare Bright stands at about $5.35 the pound, with the market nudging up 0.9 percent on the day. The red metal, as ever, leads the parade while the others trot behind.

Now permit me a word on why I love copper above all its rivals, and why that stainless steel they list so proudly is no match for it. You may build a still of stainless and it will hold your mash well enough — but it will give you back a spirit harsh with sulfur, sharp as a creditor's letter. Copper, the noble red metal, reacts. It reaches into the rising vapor and seizes the foul sulfur compounds and the meanest volatiles, dragging them out so that what drips from the worm runs clean and sweet. The monks knew it in their alembics; the brandy-makers of old France knew it; and every Appalachian moonshiner crouched over his copper pot knows it still. A stainless still is a cold accountant. A copper still is an alchemist.

That is the secret no headline prints: when China's mills and our own scrappers bid copper higher, they are bidding on the very metal that makes good liquor possible. I learned the people's affection for copper long ago, when I drove my own name into a hundred thousand copper cents across New England — coins that passed hand to hand through every saloon and eating-house, including my own Fort Wilkins, bear and tooth-pulling chair and all. Copper was the people's metal then, and it is the people's metal now.

For it is not only the distiller who covets it. The red wire carries the lightning into every house and every electric carriage; it plumbs our water lines, lines the bottoms of good kettles, sheathes the roofs that weather to that fine green crown. The great humming data-halls of this modern age are stitched together with miles of it. When a Chinese report says copper is up, it is the whole electrified world raising its hand to buy.

So mind your grades, my friends — your Bare Bright, your #1 and #2, your insulated wire and your brass and radiators — and carry them to the yard with your head high. The man who hauls copper hauls history: the conductor, the cleanser of spirits, the metal of common coins and uncommon dreams. Today the world agrees with us, and the price says so.

Keep your stills bright and your scrap honest.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins