China Says Copper Up, Aluminum Down — The Red Metal Holds Court

Step closer, friends, and mind the bear — for word comes today from the great workshops of the East. IndexBox reports that Chinese scrap prices have gone every which way at once: copper and stainless steel finding their footing, while aluminum sags like a tent with a broken pole. A mixed market, they call it. I call it the natural order reasserting itself, for in any honest reckoning the red metal rises.

And rise it does at home as well. Our own #1 Bare Bright stands at about $5.47 the pound, the market nudged up a tidy 0.6 percent on the day. Modest, but I have learned across a long life that copper keeps its dignity in small steps where lesser metals throw tantrums.

Now, observe the company copper keeps in this dispatch — stainless steel, gaining alongside. I do not begrudge the stuff its fashionable shine. But let me speak plainly on a matter dear to me as my own caged bear: you cannot make good liquor in a stainless still. You can pass vapor through it, aye, but stainless is a cold and dumb partner. It is copper that reaches into the rising spirit and plucks out the sulfurous devils — the foul volatiles that would make whiskey taste of struck matches and rotten egg.

This is no parlor trick. From the monastery alembics where patient monks distilled their first eaux-de-vie, to the Appalachian moonshiner crouched over a copper worm in the dark of the hollow, the craft has trusted one metal above all. The pot still gleams red for a reason. Brandy, rum, the clean corn liquor — all of it owes its sweetness to copper's quiet chemistry. Stainless may gain a point in Shanghai today; it will never make a dram worth drinking.

Yet the still is but one of copper's many lives. The very wire that carries word of these Chinese prices across the ocean is copper. The plumbing that brings water to your wash-basin, the green-weathered roofs and gutters, the bottoms of the good cookware, the motors humming in every electric carriage, the vast hungry halls they call data centers — all of it drinks deep of the red metal. Aluminum may weaken; copper is woven into the age itself.

I drove my name DR. G. G. WILKINS into a hundred thousand copper cents in my younger days, watched them pass hand to hand through every saloon and eating-house in New England. The people's metal, I called it then. The conductor, the purifier, the maker of good liquor. China can mix its prices as it pleases. Copper abides.

Sell your Bare Bright bright, keep your still scoured, and pour something honest tonight.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins