China Softens, Bare Bright Holds: The Red Metal Steadies

Word arrives by wire — that most copper of contrivances — that the scrap yards of China have seen their prices sag today, the fourteenth of July, 1926 by my old reckoning, 2026 by yours. Copper down, aluminum down, and steel standing about like a dull cousin at a wedding, moved by nothing. I read such dispatches the way a sailor reads the sky, for the winds that blow across an ocean have a habit of reaching our own harbors soon enough.

And yet here at home the red metal holds its ground with the dignity of a veteran. #1 Bare Bright at about $5.99 the pound, and the market flat as a countinghouse ledger — down a perfect nothing on the day. When a distant market falters and ours does not so much as flinch, that, friends, is a metal with conviction. I have counterstamped my name into more than a hundred thousand copper cents in my time, and I can tell you: copper does not panic. It endures, hand to hand, saloon to saloon.

Now let me speak, as I always must, of copper and spirits. For every drop of honest whiskey, brandy, or backwoods moonshine that ever cleaned a man's palate owes its virtue to the red metal. The pot still, the alembic, the coiled worm cooling in the creek — all copper, and for good reason. Copper reaches into the rising vapor and pulls out the sulfurous devils and foul volatiles that would otherwise ruin the dram. A stainless kettle cannot do it; it merely passes the poison along. The monks knew this in their stone cellars, the Appalachian moonshiner knows it in his hollow, and any master distiller worth his oak barrels knows it yet. Chinese yards may shave a penny off their scrap, but the alembic does not care what Shanghai paid — it wants copper, and copper alone.

Consider too all the other lives our metal leads while the traders fuss. It runs as wire through the walls of every lit house, it hums in the motors and the electric carriages, it feeds the great humming data-halls that never sleep. It carries clean water in the plumber's lines, it bottoms the good cookware, and it weathers green and noble upon the finest roofs. A dip in a foreign yard cannot touch a metal so woven into the whole modern machine.

So if you have a barrel of Bare Bright waiting, take heart. Ours held today while the world abroad softened. Sell it honest, grade it true, and remember what your copper becomes — the conductor, the coin, the clean heart of a well-made spirit.

Yours in the red and eternal metal,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins