Cobre Panama Passes Its Audit, and Copper Climbs Again

Come close, friends, and mind the bear — he is fed and friendly today, for the red metal has given us good tidings. Word arrives from the isthmus that the great Cobre Panama mine, idled and disputed these many months, has come through an SGS audit with a compliance rate near the top of the scale. A clean bill of health for one of the largest copper works on this earth, and the market answers with a nod: copper up 0.6 percent on the day, and our honest #1 Bare Bright fetching about $5.39 the pound.

Now why should a scrapper in Worcester or a distiller in the hollows care what passes in a Panamanian pit? Because every pound of cathode that mine pours back into the world steadies the price of the wire in your walls, the tubing in your trade, and — dearest to my heart — the copper that makes good liquor possible.

Permit me my favorite sermon. There is no spirit worth drinking that has not kissed copper somewhere along its journey. The monks at their alembics knew it; the Appalachian man with his pot still and his coiled worm knows it; the great Highland distilleries know it still. Copper pulls the sulfur and the foul volatiles clean out of the rising vapor — the nasty mercaptans that would turn a fine brandy into something fit only for stripping paint. A stainless still cannot do this trick; it is dead metal, a bucket with pretensions. Copper is alive in the reaction, sacrificing a little of itself to give you whiskey that tastes of grain and sunlight rather than struck matches. Centuries of distillers have trusted no other metal, and a steadier supply means the next generation of stillmakers need not flinch at the price of a new pot.

But the red metal wears a hundred coats. The same cathode bound for a still might become the windings of an electric motor, the gutters greening on a courthouse roof, the water line beneath your kitchen, or the humming nerves of one of these modern data-houses and electric carriages that swallow copper by the trainload. It is, as it ever was, the people's metal — I drove my own name into a hundred thousand copper cents in my counterstamping days precisely because copper passed hand to hand in every saloon and eating-house from Boston to the frontier.

So mark the news kindly. A mine restored is more vapor distilled, more current carried, more honest scrap worth hauling to the yard. Sort your bright wire from your radiators, keep your brass apart, and remember that the metal in your barrel is brother to the metal in your bottle.

Yours in the red metal and the clear spirit, raise a copper-kissed dram to the isthmus —

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins